Bus hijacker praised September 11 terrorists

A teenager who praised the September 11 terror attacks on the United States hijacked a German city bus with 18 people on board today and held them for almost seven hours.

He was arrested when police commandos stormed the bus after he had released the last of his hostages on an autobahn .

The 17-year-old, from Lebanon, led police on a cross-country chase from Bremen before the hostages ordeal ended 75 miles away, near Hanover.

The bus was stormed the bus and the teenager arrested on a six-lane motorway south of Hanover, police spokesman Walter Wallott said.

No shots were fired during the storming, and none of the hostages nor the gunman was injured during the odyssey, police said.

Bremen’s top security official, Kuno Boese, said the youth had written a letter to his parents on Thursday praising the September 11 suicide hijackers.

“The crime has a radical Islamic motive,” Boese said.

Police said the gunman asked for food, water, a mobile phone and a fresh bus driver to replace the “psychologically shaky” driver on board.

He also demanded to talk to Bremen Mayor Henning Scherf, police spokesman Ronald Walter said, but the mayor’s office said he never did.

The bus driver radioed a distress call to police when the gunman hijacked the bus around 9:30 a.m. in the northern city of Bremen. There were 18 passengers, including children, on board at the time, police said.

“I’m on my way to Hanover. A man with a gun is on board,” the 35-year-old driver told the bus company by radio.

With the hostages crowded into the back of the bus and the hijacker training his gun on the driver’s back, the bus headed onto the autobahn, pursued by police cars and ambulances at a distance.

TV images showed the red-and-white bus speeding along the autobahn with the driver in a vest and tie and the hijacker perched behind him in a dark shirt and baseball cap.

At one point, the hijacker fired toward the police cars, but no one was injured and it was unclear whether the gun had live rounds, officials said.

After about two hours, the hijacker stopped the bus on the way south of Hanover, 75 miles from Bremen, where police cars and heavily armed commandos in bullet-proof vests surrounded it and closed off both directions in the midst of the Friday afternoon rush hour.

Before police moved to end the stand-off, the man gradually released 10 hostages. Three had been freed or escaped at the start of the hijacking.

It was Germany’s second bus hijacking in two weeks.

On April 11, an armed ex-convict commandeered a Berlin city bus after a bank robbery. Police stormed the bus after more than four hours, shooting the hijacker in the shoulder and freeing his last two hostages unharmed.