An Air China Boeing 737 was hijacked after taking off from Beijing yesterday but had landed in central China and the incident had been resolved, civil aviation and airport officials said.

“It has already been handled successfully and we are investigating it,” a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said. Another Zhengzhou airport official said the passengers had left the aircraft safely. The plane was not damaged, the official said.

No details were available as to how the plane was hijacked, how many people were involved or how the incident ended.

Additional security

An official at the airport in Beijing said the plane took off at 0040 GMT and had been scheduled to land in Hunan at 0230 GMT. She said 108 passengers had checked in for the flight, but did not know how many crew members were aboard.

China saw a rash of hijackings in the early 1990s, mostly by people demanding to go to Taiwan, and it later tightened air safety. It took additional security measures after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, including putting air marshals on flights.

An Air China representative at Beijing airport said he had heard nothing of yesterday’s incident, and a second CAAC official said it had not been serious. “It is not that serious, we even cannot define it as a ‘hijacking’,” a spokeswoman from CAAC said but gave no further details.

In January 2003, a would-be hijacker detonated homemade explosives on board a plane, injuring himself and another passenger before an in-flight security guard subdued him.

That plane, a Sichuan Airlines B3043 on a 30-minute flight from the western city of Chongqing to Chengdu in Sichuan province, landed safely, state media reported. There were 10 other passengers and five crew members aboard the small plane, it added.

<B>ohn Ruwitch</B>