Iran's Revolutionary Guard on Friday said that authorities had disrupted an attempted hijacking of a passenger plane in flight the previous night, The Associated Press reported.
The purported hijacking targeted an Iran Air Fokker 100 regional commercial jet heading from the southwestern city of Ahvaz to the northwestern city of Mashhad, the Guard said.
The announcement did not identify the hijacker, saying only the hijacker sought to divert the flight to the "southern shores of the Persian Gulf."
It added the Iran Air flight made an emergency landing in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, and no one was injured in the incident. It was not immediately clear if the purported hijacker had been armed during the attempt.
A Fokker 100 was scheduled to take off from Ahvaz for Mashhad at 7:15 p.m. Thursday, according to the plane-tracking website FlightRadar24.com.
AP noted that Iranian domestic flights reportedly carry armed air marshals from the Guard aboard them to disrupt any attempted attack or hijacking. The Guard took over aviation security in the 1980s after a series of incidents involving Iranian opposition groups seizing aircraft in the unrest that followed Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)