A Somalian woman tried to stab two pilots mid-air and threatened to blow up the aircraft as she grappled with controls in the cockpit of a New Zealand domestic flight today.
The 33-year-old, named in media reports today as Asha Ali Abdille, also inflicted a minor knife injury on a woman passenger and threatened others as she demanded to be flown to Australia. The other six passengers were unharmed.
Police said that Ms Abdille was tampering with the controls of the twin-engine turboprop as it was coming in to land at Christchurch, on the South Island, but rough weather conditions caused her to stumble.
After the aircraft landed and passengers were evacuated through the rear door of the aircraft, the pilot and co-pilot wrestled her to the floor, enabling armed officers to storm aboard with dogs.
Ms Abdille, who has been charged with hijacking and three counts of assault, had been seated directly behind the cockpit before entering it ten minutes into the flight from the provincial town of Blenheim, in the South Island. She claimed that there were two bombs on board.
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A Mayday call was received about 7.40am (1840 GMT) New Zealand time and the flight landed at 8.06am. The pilots had continued to communicate with ground control, though this was reported to have been “somewhat stilted”.
No explosives were found but two knives were recovered: one on the woman and one on the runway. Passengers on domestic flights out of Blenheim are not subject to security checks and hand luggage is not scanned.
Ms Abdille was born in Sudan but grew up in Somalia. When fighting began in Mogadishu in 1991, she was separated from her family and eventually flown to New Zealand in 1994 as a refugee.
She has moved frequently since and is said to be alienated from her community and frustrated by failures to reunite with her family.
A Blenheim Muslim community spokesman, Zayad Blissett, said that Ms Abdille was not part of the community. “She has quite a history of mental instability and she has threatened to kill family here. She’s an alcoholic and very unstable.”
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A taxi driver says Ms Abdille had seemed “vague” when he took her to Blenheim airport. The driver, who identified himself as Colin, told New Zealand radio: “She was a wee bit vague. He described her as “away with the fairies.”
“She couldn’t work out where she wanted to go for while which I thought was quite strange at that time of the morning. She was very nervous, very unsure of where she wanted to go and what she wanted to do.”
The two pilots have been praised for their courage and one was having surgery for cuts to his hand while the other sustained a knife wound to his foot and was discharged from hospital.
One witness described the scene as “like something from a Bruce Willis movie”. Andrew Sare said Ms Abdille was hauled off the plane by armed police, handcuffed and forced to the ground.