A sit-in on board a Lufthansa plane by 56 Iranian monarchist protesters ended peacefully at Brussels airport today as Belgian police escorted them all off the aircraft.
The siege ended at 5.45am local time, some 16 hours after the plane had landed on a flight from Frankfurt. "The plane is empty now and police are checking the identities of the passengers. There was no violence at all," a spokesman said.
Other passengers and crew had disembarked when the plane landed last night and the pilot had disabled the controls.
At one point in the night police boarded and moved the Boeing 737 after the unarmed men and women refused to disembark in a protest against Iran's Islamic government.
The plane was towed away from its stand at Brussels National airport towards an area of the airfield remote from journalists watching from the terminal. Several riot control vehicles assembled near the aircraft, which was flanked by police vans.
The protesters will face only "administrative arrest", which meant they would shortly be free to leave.
"We want the European Union to remove the Islamic leaders from Iran," Armin Atshgar, one of the protesters, said by mobile phone during the sit-in. "We want to remove the mullahs from power."
Mr Atshgar described himself as a member of Anjomane Padeshahi, a group advocating the restoration of Iran's royal family, which was ousted in the 1979 Islamic revolution.