Eurasia Press & News
The perpetrator attempted to land the plane in a Gulf country, Iranian media reported the corps as saying. Many details surrounding the incident are unknown.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it has thwarted a plane hijacking.
An unidentified perpetrator tried to hijack an Iran Air flight from Ahwaz to Mashhad on Thursday night. The elite Iranian military unit said members of its Flight Security Guard Corps foiled the plan. The plane conducted an emergency landing in Isfahan and the would-be hijacker was arrested, the semi-official Tasnim News Agency reported Friday.
The IRGC statement, which was released to state media, left out many details, including the motivation of the perpetrator and how the IRGC stopped the hijacking. The corps said the hijacker intended to land the plane in a Gulf country.
“Initial reports suggested that the perpetrator of this conspiracy intended to land the plane at an airport in one of the southern Arab states of the Persian Gulf,” they said.
Ahwaz is in southwest Iran’s Khuzestan province near the Iraqi border. It is a diverse city with a large Arab population. Mashhad is a holy city for Shiite Muslims in northeast Iran. It was the site of one of the several mysterious explosions at Iranian facilities last summer.
The plane was a Fokker 100 aircraft. These planes are produced in the Netherlands. Nobody was injured during the attempted hijacking, according to the IRGC.
