March 26, 2021
The Pasdaran have announced the foiling of a hijacking, but it doesn’t appear that the Pasdaran had anything to do with the foiling, which seems to have been done by the aircraft cabin crew.
The Pasdaran, which run the country’s air marshal program, announced March 5 that an attempted hijacking of a passenger plane the previous night had been stopped, though it offered few details on what happened.
The Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA), however, attributed the alleged hijacking to a disruptive family of four that grappled with the crew and claimed to have brought a bomb on board. ILNA said the cabin crew subdued them. It said, “The pilot was informed by one of the attendants”—making no mention of any Pasdaran—who then landed in Esfahan where the family was arrested at the airport.
If air marshals were aboard the plane, any hijacker should have been arrested in the air.
The ILNA report said no bomb was found on board the plane and no passengers were injured in the incident.
The purported hijacking targeted an Iran Air Fokker 100 regional commercial jet heading from Ahvaz to Mashhad, the Pasdaran said on their website.
The Pasdar announcement did not identify any hijacker, saying only that the hijacker—in the singular—sought to divert the flight to the “southern shores of the Persian Gulf.”
Iranian domestic flights can carry armed air marshals from the Pasdaran aboard them to disrupt any attempted attack or hijacking. The Pasdaran took over aviation security in the 1980s after a series of incidents involving Iranian opposition groups seizing aircraft in the unrest that followed the country’s 1979 revolution.
The world’s first aircraft hijacking was in 1919 in Europe. Hijackings were a major craze from 1968 to 2000, after which they largely died out. The United States still has air marshals, but only places them on selected flights now. It is assumed that Iran also uses air marshals to a limited extent these days, and it appears from the ILNA story that there were no air marshals on the March 4 flight, though the Pasdaran statement tried to make it appear air marshals were aboard.
The last two known attempted hijackings in Iran were in 2000. In September 2000, a man armed with a fake pistol and a gasoline bomb sought to seize an Iran Air Fokker 100, trying to get the flight to go to France. He started a fire aboard and later was detained.
In November 2000, armed men from four families seized a Yakovlev YAK-40 aircraft flown by Iranian Ariatour Airlines, demanding to be flown to the United States. Air marshals foiled the attempt, though one of the Pasdaran was shot and a second stabbed. A flight attendant and five hijackers also were injured, reports at the time said.
