Hijacker Surrenders After Forcing Turkish Airliner to Southern Italy

A Turkish Airlines Boeing 737-400 is seen in this undated file photo released by the Turkish Airlines. A Turkish Airlines plane carrying more than 100 passengers from Tirana, Albania, to Istanbul, was hijacked Tuesday and landed at Italy's Brindisi airport. The plane was hijacked in Greek air space, News reports said the plane was a Boeing 737-400. (AP)

BRINDISI, Italy, Oct. 3 -- A Turkish man hijacked a jetliner carrying 113 people on an Albania-to-Turkey flight Tuesday and forced it to land in southern Italy, where he surrendered and released all the passengers unharmed, officials said.

Two senior Turkish officials said the hijacker was seeking political asylum. An Italian security official said the man had a message for Pope Benedict XVI, but he said he did not know what it was.

Earlier accounts from the plane's operator, Turkish Airlines, said that the Boeing 737-400 had been hijacked by two Turks and that they were protesting the pope's planned visit to Turkey next month.

Turkish Transport Minister Binali Yildirim said the hijacker was seeking to evade military service in his native Turkey. "It has nothing to do with the pope's visit; it was a simple attempt of seeking political asylum under the influence of psychological problems," Yildirim said.

The passengers got off the plane about two hours after it landed in Brindisi, a town on southern Italy's Adriatic coast. The jet was on a darkened tarmac, with a firetruck carrying the airport's chief of security parked nearby.

The passengers were being questioned one by one by Italian authorities to confirm their identities and rule out any possibility that the hijacker had an accomplice.

The plane was making a routine flight from the Albanian capital, Tirana, to Istanbul when it was seized. A man burst into the cockpit and said, "There's two of us," leading authorities to believe that the man was not acting alone, according to an Italian security official in Brindisi. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

The captain issued an alert that the plane had been hijacked. The plane's crew later contacted Italian air traffic controllers and asked to land in Brindisi. The plane was escorted to the ground by two Italian military jets, according to the Italian air traffic agency ENAV.

The hijacker was identified as Hakan Ekinci. He had converted to Christianity and was an army deserter and anti-militarist who fled to Albania this year, according to the private Dogan News Agency and NTV television in Turkey.

Ekinci, 28, sent a letter to Benedict on Aug. 30 asking for help to avoid returning to military service in Turkey, Dogan reported.

"I am Hakan Ekinci, I am a Christian and I never want to serve in a Muslim army," he said in the letter, according to Dogan, which said it had obtained the letter from a blog on the Internet. "I am begging you for help as the spiritual leader of us, Christians' world."