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Crew foils bid to crash Chinese plane

BEIJING: A top Chinese official on Sunday said the crew of a plane had foiled an attempt by a group of persons on board to take control of the plane and crash it after the aircraft took off from Urumqi, capital of the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Friday.

The plane belonging to China Southern Airlines took off at 10:35 a.m. local time on Friday and was forced to land at Lanzhou, capital of neighbouring Gansu Province, at 12:40 p.m. because “some people were attempting to create an air disaster,” said Nur Bekri, chairman of the Xinjiang regional government, on the sidelines of the ongoing Parliament session.

The terrorists were stopped in time by the air crew, and all the passengers and crew members on board were safe, he told reporters after a panel discussion at the ongoing session of the National People’s Congress (NPC). The plane arrived in its destination of Beijing on Saturday. The official did not elaborate, just saying that the authorities are investigating “who the attackers are, where they are from and what’s their background”. “But we can be sure that this was a case intending to create an air crash,” he said.

The terrorists killed earlier this year in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region had planned an attack targeting the Beijing Olympic Games, a senior Chinese official said here on Sunday. Chinese police smashed a terrorist gang in January in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, killing two and arresting 15 others.

“Obviously, the gang had planned an attack targeting the Olympics,” said Wang Lequan, chief of the Xinjiang autonomous regional committee of the Communist Party of China on the sidelines of the national parliamentary session. — Xinhua

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