During the 1970s plane hijackings became a somewhat regularly recurrent phenomenon. In a post-9/11 world, however, such instances have become rare to the point of anachronism. Tuesday's hijacking of a Khartoum-bound plane from the town of Nyala in southern Darfur thus provided a bizarre twist to events in that troubled area. Hijackers attempted to divert the plane to Cairo, but when Egypt refused to allow the plane to land it headed to southern Libya near the Sudanese border. At first the hijackers refused to negotiate with anyone, but finally surrendered after releasing hostages.
