Man planned to crash plane in Frankfurt

IN A chilling reminder of the September 11 attacks, a man hijacked a light aircraft and threatened to crash into the European Central Bank tower in Frankfurt yesterday before landing and being arrested.

Military jets had been scrambled after the small single-engined plane began circling over the centre of the city, hundreds of metres above the skyscrapers in Germany’s financial capital.

The 32-year-old pilot told N-TV television he wanted to draw attention to a female astronaut who died in the US space shuttle Challenger which exploded shortly after take-off in January 1986.

Frankfurt airport was closed down, tall buildings in the city evacuated and military aircraft patrolled the sky as the motorised glider circled the city for more than two hours.

A spokesman for Germany’s air traffic control authority said he did not believe there was a terrorist link to yesterday’s incident.

“I want to make my big idol Judith Resnik famous,” the man, speaking what appeared to be native German, told N-TV after demanding to speak to the station. “I want to draw attention to the first Jewish female astronaut.”

Ms Resnik, who died on board Challenger, was Jewish. The man did not say why he may have targeted the European Central Bank, based in Frankfurt, which sets interest rates for hundreds of millions of Europeans in 12 countries.

A spokesman for air traffic control said the armed man hijacked a plane at Babenhausen airfield southeast of Frankfurt at 2:55pm (1355 Irish time) and had taken up contact with the Frankfurt airport tower.

The sight of an unauthorised plane flying among Frankfurt’s skyscrapers conjured up frightening images that recalled the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States involving hijacked planes and subsequent incidents.

On September 11, three planes crashed into New York’s twin World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in the worst such attack in modern history. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in Pennsylvania.

Exactly a year ago, on January 5, 2002, a 15-year-old student pilot, Charles Bishop, flew a stolen single-engine Cessna into the 20th floor of the Bank of America building, a skyscraper in Tampa, Florida, killing himself and damaging the building.

On April 18 last year, a small Piper aircraft crashed into the 127 metre-high Pirelli skyscraper in Milan setting the top floors of the 30-storey building on fire. Three people died.