A knife-wielding Iraqi hijacked a Qatar Airways airliner during a Middle East flight, but he surrendered to police after the aircraft landed in Saudi Arabia yesterday, the Qatari satellite television station al-Jazeera reported.
A Qatar Airways official said all 133 passengers travelling on the Airbus A300 were safe and had disembarked at the airport at Ha'il in northern Saudi Arabia.
"The hijack is over. Everything is safe," he said in Dubai.
Two passengers on the aircraft, which had been flying from the Qatari capital, Doha, to Amman, told al-Jazeera the hijacker wielded a long knife.
There was no official word on the hijacker's motives, but one of the passengers said: "He carried a very long knife, but he did not use violence. He did not want to go to Amman apparently because he has a problem with Jordan or Baghdad."
The second passenger said most people on board the aircraft were Arabs.
He said the aircraft circled over Ha'il airport five or six times before it was allowed to land, and negotiations leading to the hijacker's surrender lasted 90 minutes.
"Later, high-ranking Saudi police officers negotiated further with the hijacker in the cockpit and then escorted him into the terminal building," the passenger said. He named the hijacker as Kamal Ussama Adel Hussein.