US hijacker is captured in Portugal after 41 years

A 1970s militant who carried out one of the most brazen airplane hijackings in US history lived for decades in a Portuguese hamlet with his wife and two children, neighbours said.

George Wright, 68, was taken into custody on Monday at the request of the US government, which is seeking his extradition for escaping from a New Jersey jail after being convicted of killing a gas station attendant.

The Portuguese news agency Lusa, citing unnamed police sources, reported the former Black Liberation Army (BLA) member plans to fight any extradition.

Until his arrest, life was sweet for Wright in Almocageme, 28 miles west of Lisbon. Fluent in Portuguese, he had no apparent profession but worked odd jobs, most recently as a nightclub bouncer.

He married a Portuguese woman, Maria do Rosario Valente, daughter of a retired army officer.

They had two children — Portuguese-born Marco and Sara — now in their early 20s. Neighbours estimated the family had been in the village for at least 20 years.

Wright was convicted of the 1962 murder of gas station owner Walter Patterson, a decorated Second World War veteran shot during a robbery at his business in New Jersey.

Eight years into his 15 to 30-year prison term, Wright and three other men escaped from the Bayside State Prison farm in New Jersey, in August 1970.

The FBI said Wright became affiliated with an underground militant group, the BLA, and lived in a “communal family” with several of its members in Detroit.

In 1972, Wright — dressed as a priest and using an alias — hijacked a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami with four other BLA members and three children.

After releasing the 86 other passengers in exchange for a $1 million ransom — delivered by an FBI agent wearing only swim trunks, as per the hijackers’ demands — the hijackers forced the plane to fly to Boston. There an international navigator was taken aboard, and the plane was flown to Algeria, where the hijackers sought asylum.

The group was taken in by American writer and activist Eldridge Cleaver, who had been permitted by Algeria’s Socialist government to open an office of the Black Panther Movement in that country in 1970. The Algerian president at the time professed sympathy for what he saw as worldwide liberation struggles.

At the request of the American government, Algerian officials returned the plane and the money to the US. They then briefly detained the hijackers before allowing them to stay. Their movements were restricted in Algeria, and the president ignored their calls for asylum and requests to return the ransom money to them.

The group eventually made its way to France, where Wright’s associates were tracked down, arrested, tried and convicted in Paris in 1976. The French government, however, refused to extradite them to the US, where they would have faced longer sentences.

Wright remained at large until last week when Portuguese police matched his fingerprints and US agents moved in on his capture.