El Al passenger charged with attempted hijack

The Israeli government said yesterday that an incident aboard an El Al plane in which an Arab-Israeli was wrestled to the floor by a security guard was "to all appearances a terror attack".

The statement was the first official Israeli reaction to the event late on Sunday, which led to confusion over whether the assailant had tried to hijack the aircraft on a flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul.

A Turkish court charged Tawfiq Fukra, an Arab with Israeli citizenship, yesterday with attempting to hijack a plane. No trial date was set. The suspect will remain in custody until first hearing.

Israeli radio reported yesterday that the alleged hijacker, had only jostled a stewardess because she had refused to give him a drink of water.

But Turkish police, who are continuing to interrogate the 23-year-old, said he had confessed that he intended to hijack the plane and crash it into a building in the style of the 11 September attacks on the United States.

The Israeli statement said Mr Fukra told the guards holding him: "Today is the day I die, and I do this because they killed [my] brothers."

In the event, the plane landed safely in Istanbul and none of the passengers on board was harmed. El Al has portrayed the episode as proof that its tight security measures work.

The one thing all the accounts were agreed on was that there had been a breach of security. El Al's general manager, Amos Shapira, said: "From what we know now,there is no doubt that there was an attempted terrorist attack here. There was an attempt to hijack the plane."

Mr Fukra managed to smuggle a small penknife on board through the security checks at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport, the most rigorous in the world. And two sky marshals, security guards disguised as passengers who travel on every El Al flight, had wrestled Mr Fukra to the floor, stripping him to make sure he was not carrying any explosives and sitting on top of him until the plane landed.

But the events that led to his arrest were in dispute. The Israeli Airports Authority denied earlier reports that Mr Fukra had tried to stab a female flight attendant, saying that he had not taken the knife out of his pocket but that the marshals had found it when they searched him.

Israeli radio reported that Mr Fukra got up several times to ask for a glass of water but was refused. When the attendant asked him to sit down because the plane was about to land, he jostled her and the security guards on the plane jumped him.

Passengers were quoted as saying that Mr Fukra had tried to break into the cockpit. Turkish police said yesterday that he had confessed he wanted to turn the plane round and crash it into a building in Tel Aviv. That increased the confusion because the incident happened 15 minutes before the plane was scheduled to land in Istanbul. It had left Tel Aviv almost two hours previously.