Posted on 09/21/2001 5:45:03 AM PDT by Bald Eagle
China tests anti-terrorism ability in mock hijack
Hundreds of police, fire and medical personnel took part in the exercise on Wednesday at Shenzhen's Huangtian airport in which two people "hijacked" a domestic flight, threatening to blow it up if they were not flown overseas, they said.
Officials said they had planned the exercise, the largest ever on mainland China, long before last week's attacks on the United States when hijacked passenger planes were crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Reuters reported.
But the exercise demonstrated China's zero-tolerance approach to air piracy and airport officials said they had stepped up security in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington.
"This year's event is the biggest ever," a Huangtian airport security official told Reuters.
"Apart from such regular events we have also stepped up safety measures at checkpoints," she said. "All passengers' luggage is opened for checks and the sensitivity of metal detectors is tuned to the highest level."
In the exercise, Huangtian's air traffic control centre was informed that two people carrying home-made explosives had hijacked the fictitious Haitian Airlines flight 123 from Shenzhen to the eastern city of Fuzhou, officials said.
The flight crew pretended to agree to their demands to fly overseas and secretly turned back towards Huangtian, but the hijackers realised they had been tricked as they approached the airport near the southern Chinese coast.
The exercise was based on the crew overpowering one hijacker in the air and the other detonating his explosives, killing himself and blowing a large hole in the plane, through which five passengers were sucked out and plunged into the sea below.
It involved the plane eventually landing, skidding off the runway, firefighters spraying the area with fire-resistant foam and passengers escaping on inflatable slides. Emergency services and helicopters were to scramble to deal with the injured and rescue the passengers who fell into the sea, officials said.
In reality, the airliner took off from Huangtian and landed again after circling the airport a few times.
In the early 1990s, flights to and from Fuzhou were frequent targets of hijackers trying to reach Taiwan.
China overhauled airport security in the mid-1990s after more than a dozen flights were hijacked and forced to go to Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a rogue province that must be reunited with the mainland.
In September last year, onboard security men foiled an attempted hijack of a Xinhua Airlines passenger plane from Inner Mongolia to Beijing and killed the hijacker with his own knife, according to airport officials.
China has also stepped up cooperation with Taiwan to help bring hijackers to justice.
Taiwan sent eight Chinese hijackers, including an Air China captain and his wife, back to the mainland in June this year to face trial.
They had all been serving jail sentences for hijackings in the 1990s but, as Beijing does not recognise the verdicts of Taiwan courts, they now face even longer prison terms or death sentences as air piracy is a capital offence in China
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