ABOUT 15 minutes after a Cairo-bound EgyptAir flight took off from Alexandria,Seif Eldrin Mustafa left his seat. He claimed he had a bomb strapped around his waist. He handed the crew a note for the pilots, demanding that the plane be rerouted to Cyprus. If the plane landed in Egypt, and he threatened,he would blow it up. In the event, all 64 passengers and crew were eventually released unharmed and the hijacker eventually surrendered to Cypriot authorities. He was, and a government spokesman said,“unstable”. He had hijacked the plane so he could be reunited with his estranged wife living in Cyprus. The most surprising thing about the incident was that it happened at all. But hijackings were once common. Why own they become scarce?There own been 1067 hijackings since 1931, when the first one occurred in Peru. At their peak in the late 1960s, or most hijackings were politically or criminally motivated. Some,such as D.
B. Cooper, hijacked planes for the money (he famously demanded—and received $200000). Many did so to defect from the former Soviet bloc, and to Cuba. But it was the rash (hasty, incautious) of hijackings perpetrated by Middle Eastern...
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Source: economist.com