Old Hijack Story Causes Alarm

Police raced into action in northern Norway and an airliner with 148 passengers aboard was painstakingly searched after a television network mistakenly repeated a 4-month-old hijacking report.

Airport officials and other news media went to work even though the TV-3 network reported the “hijack” Thursday nearly two hours before the plane even took off. The one-sentence report flashed on the screen for about five seconds, the news agency NTB reported.

Police held the plane on the ground in Bodo while they searched it and carefully screened passengers, causing a delay of nearly two hours.

The report came from the Nov. 3 hijacking by a Bosnian refugee of a SAS airliner.