Mauritania plane passengers beat up hijacker

MADRID, Feb 16 (Reuters) Passengers on a hijacked Air Mauritania plane ended the ordeal when they stormed the cockpit and beat up the lone gunman after the aircraft landed in Spain's Canary Islands night, Spanish police said.

As armed police surrounded yesterday the Boeing 737 on the runway, five passengers and the co-pilot burst into the cockpit and knocked the hijacker to the ground before beating him up, a police spokesman said.

''When we landed at Las Palmas ... we entered (the cockpit) and hit him and knocked him down,'' one passenger told television station CNN+.

The fight gave the crew time to let in security forces, who swiftly arrested the man, the police spokesman said.

Passengers said they had been terrified when they realised their internal flight from the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott to the port of Nouadhibou had been seized.

Passenger Jose Manuel told newspaper ABC that fellow travellers, mostly Spaniards, had donned life jackets, thinking the plane was going to crash.

''The plane has been hijacked! You should follow instructions. We are going to Dakhla (In Western Sahara),'' the hijacker announced from the cockpit soon after taking control, newspaper El Mundo reported passenger Mohamed Ahmed as saying.

The hijacker, who police said was a 32-year-old Mauritanian man, ordered passengers to the back of the plane and held a gun to the pilot's head but one passenger managed to alert Spanish emergency services by mobile phone, media reported.

The man had demanded the plane fly to Paris, but the pilot told him the plane had to be refuelled first. Moroccan authorities refused to let it land in Western Sahara so the 71 passengers and eight crew flew on to the Spanish island of Gran Canaria.

Police have not revealed the hijacker's motive but Spanish media have reported he was seeking political asylum in France.

The hijacking came on same day that Spain began the trial of 29 people, mostly Moroccans, for the 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 191 people, and days after al Qaeda called for attacks on Mauritania's rulers.

Reuters PDM DB2016