Plane hijack by Somali ends peacefully in US

NEW YORK (Reuter) - An eight-hour hijack of a Lufthansa Airbus across the Atlantic with 104 people on board ended peacefully last night when the plane landed safely at New York's J F Kennedy airport and the lone gunman, a 31-year-old Somali, surrendered. Police said no one was injured during the hijack which started in Germany and ended with the gunman holding his hands high and walking down the plane's steps. The hijacker, named as Shuriye Farah Siyad, wanted political asylum in the United States and US intervention in Bosnia.

Rudolf Seiters, the German Interior Minister, told a news conference that Siyad had come from Oslo to Frankfurt on Wednesday, but it was still unclear how he had managed to smuggle a gun aboard a plane. The hijack set off a new storm of controversy about security at Frankfurt airport and raised fears that little has changed at the airport since 1988, when the bomb which destroyed a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, was smuggled on board.