BANGLADESH Troops kill passenger who forced emergency landing

Bangladesh — Special forces troops stormed a plane on the tarmac of a Bangladesh airport, fatally shooting a passenger who sought to speak with the country’s prime minister, officials said on Monday.

Biman Bangladesh Airlines Flight 147 had been traveling on Sunday to Dubai from Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. The passenger, identified by police as Mohammed Polash Ahmed, stormed the cockpit about 15 minutes after takeoff, forcing the pilot into making an emergency landing in Chittagong, where the plane had been scheduled to make a stop.

A senior official with Biman Bangladesh Airlines, speaking on condition of anonymity, said seven crew members and 143 passengers, including Ahmed, who was in his mid-30s, were aboard the plane.

After landing at Shah Amanat International Airport on Sunday evening, all but one crew member — who was kept as a hostage but not harmed — were evacuated, the official said.

Military commandos then rushed the plane and shot Ahmed after he refused to surrender.

Mohammad Mufti Mahmud Khan, a spokesman for the Rapid Action Battalion, a Bangladeshi police force, said investigators had taken Ahmed’s fingerprint and matched it in a criminal database.

Khan would not elaborate on the case against Ahmed, who lived in a district near Dhaka. But he said there was no evidence at this point that Ahmed had links to terrorist groups that have struck before in Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim nation of about 160 million people.

“We are trying to get more information about his old case,” he said.

Passengers and officials initially told reporters that Ahmed had been carrying a pistol and had claimed to have a bomb on the aircraft. One pas-DHAKA, senger, Osman Gani, said Ahmed, who was sitting in the 17th row, had threatened to shoot people shortly after takeoff.

“He also fired several rounds, leaving the passengers panicked,” Gani was quoted as saying by the Dhaka Tribune.

But later, a local police commissioner, Mahabubor Rahman, said the pistol was a fake. And on Monday, Mohibul Haque, the secretary of Bangladesh’s civil aviation and tourism ministry, would not confirm that Ahmed was carrying a weapon — real or fake — of any kind.

Officials said that during the standoff, the suspect told army officials that he wanted to speak with his wife and Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina.

M. Naim Hassan, chairman of Bangladesh’s Civil Aviation Authority, told reporters that Ahmed appeared “mentally imbalanced” based on his behavior.