Update: Turkish Hijacker Seeking Asylum In Italy
Shaveta Bansal - All Headline News Staff Writer Rome, Italy (AHN) - A Turkish man who on Tuesday hijacked a Turkish Airlines plane and forced pilots to fly to Italy is seeking political asylum after surrendering to authorities. The officials have identified the man as Hakan Ekinci, an army deserter who has converted to Christianity and fears a persecution if he returns back to his Muslim homeland. An Italian prosecutor, who interrogated Ekinci after he surrendered, on Wednesday said that the suspect apparently wanted to speak to Pope Benedict XVI, and wanted the Vatican to protect him for he had embraced his religion. "It looks like it was an operation which he had planned for some time, the reasons are of religious nature," Brindisi Prosecutor Giuseppe Giannuzzi told a news conference. Turkish officials have said that Hakan Ekinci was being sent back by Albania, where he had been denied asylum, to Turkey aboard the Turkish Airlines Boeing 737-400, with police waiting to arrest him in Istanbul where the 28-year-old deserter and convicted swindler would have landed Tuesday night. However, Italy's interior minister Giuliano Amato told lawmakers that Ekinci managed to slip into the cockpit and passed a note to the pilot insisting him to deliver it to the pope, or otherwise accomplices aboard another plane would "blow that plane up." But authorities have confirmed that Ekinci was unarmed and that there was no other p |
