A man donned a ski mask and attempted to force his way into the cockpit of a Turkish Airlines jet today, claiming he was armed with a bomb. Passengers subsequently confronted the man and subdued him; early reports from the media in Turkey suggest that one or two passengers were sitting on the man when the police boarded the plane on landing in Ataturk airport, Istanbul.

While the motives of the assailant are not clear at this point, it is claimed that the man is of Turkish descent and comes from a Kurdish village in Anatolia.

There were fifty-nine passengers on board the flight which claimed that voices could be heard from near the back seats of the jet and the man then pulled on a ski mask. Stating that he had a bomb, he then approached the cockpit with a device apparently looking like a radio handset. It was at this point that pilots raised the alarm and passengers onboard wrestled the suspect to the floor. Nobody was hurt in the incident and it is understood that the explosives were discovered to be bogus.

The suspect is believed to have demanded that the plane return to its origins in Oslo, otherwise he intended to blow up the plane in mid-air. A Turkish state news agency has stated that the man possessed a card which declared him as a disabled person, and that he suffered from a mental illness.

Reported by Mike Jordison.

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