NEW YORK, March 11 -- The Ethiopian man accused of hijacking a Lufthansa jet in 1993 and forcing the pilot to fly from Germany to New York with a planeload of terrified passengers told a federal jury Monday that his actions were justified and he should be acquitted of the crime. Serving as his own attorney, Nebiu Demeke, 23, told the Brooklyn federal court panel he was forced to commandeer the plane when he was repeatedly denied a visa to legally enter the United States. 'I'm the first victim,' he told jurors during opening statements. 'I was deprived of coming to the U.S. to engage in business... I am the victim of an enormous fraud. 'It was an act of desperateness, I was forced to hijack the plane,' Demeke added. 'I didn't want to.' Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Mehler told the jurors that Demeke, hidden behind a black ski mask, terrorized the plane's inhabitants for 11 hours, pressing a gun against the pilots' temple, screaming out demands and threatening to kill passengers one by one if the demands were not met. 'The pilot begged him to release the passengers and crew' during an emergency refueling stop in Hanover, Germany, Mehler said. 'You'll learn that the defendant adamantly refused and that the pilots, passengers and crew all remained hostages to this defendant.' Demeke was finally arrested after Flight 592 landed at New York's Kennedy Airport on Feb. 11, 1993, 11 hours after the hijacker emerged from the plane bathroom, wearing a ski mask and brandishing a small black pistol.
It was later revealed that the gun was a starter's pistol which could only fire blanks. 'I saw a mask, I saw the head and then I saw that he had a pistol in his right hand and in the next instant he was screaming,' said the plane's co-pilot Kay Juergens, the prosecution's first witness. 'My first feeling was, 'It can't be true.' This was the time of Mardi Gras in Germany and I thought it was a joke, a bad joke. 'Then he was waving his arm (with the gun) from the head of the captain to my head and he said, 'Turn right immediately, fly to New York or I'll shoot you.' That's when I realized a hijacking was going on.' Prosecutors say the ordeal ended in New York, when Demeke agreed to surrender his gun to the plane's captain in exchange for the captain's sunglasses. The 94 passengers and 10 crew members were then released and Demeke was taken into custody and charged with air piracy. Demeke, who was born in Ethiopia but lived in Morocco most of his life, was living in Frankfurt at the time of the hijacking. He had applied for political asylum and then withdrew the petition and was on his way back to Ethiopia on the Lufthansa flight. He allegedly smuggled the starter's pistol onto the plane by hiding it under his hat, concealing it from airport security officers who scanned him from the shoulders down. The incident marked the first trans-Atlantic hijacking in 16 years.
