Simon Sturdee
AFP
February 8, 2014
Turkey scrambled two F-16 jets Friday to force down an airliner from Ukraine when an apparently drunk would-be hijacker ordered it to Sochi where the Winter Olympics opening ceremony was underway.
The Ukrainian man, brandishing what he said was a detonator, tried to gain access to the cockpit of the aircraft operated by Turkey’s Pegasus Airlines with 110 people on board, officials said.
The Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported that the man was inebriated. The agency and Istanbul’s governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu said the man had neither a gun nor explosives.
“A Ukrainian man, born in 1969, was in an advanced state of drunkenness and tried to get into the cockpit, shouting ‘Let’s go to Sochi’,” Interfax-Ukraine quoted Ukrainian security services as saying.
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