Passengers overpowered a suspected armed hijacker who had commandeered a Mauritanian plane on Thursday when he was knocked off his feet during a hard landing, a source close to the Mauritanian presidency said. The Air Mauritania Boeing 737 was on an internal flight in Mauritania when the hijacker, armed with pistols, demanded to be flown to France, officials said. The pilot landed in Spain's Canary Islands instead, where Spanish police arrested the man. | "When the pilot landed he deliberately braked very hard. The man fell to the ground and was jumped on by passengers. He fired two bullets but there are no serious injuries." |
| "Ow! Ow! The bastard shot me!" "Don't worry about it! Those aren't serious injuries!" "That's my brisket bleeding!" |
Air Mauritania's Director General Mohamed Ould El Moctar said the crew told him nobody was hurt and that the hijacker had acted alone. "The lone hijacker was armed with two pistols but it is not clear whether these were real or not," he told Al Jazeera television.