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Passengers freed on hijacked Colombian jet
The drama riveted Colombians, who tuned to radios and TV sets. They listened to one hostage, while still on the plane, describe the scene in a furtive cell phone conversation with local RCN radio. "They have indicated to us they have explosives," Reinaldo Duque, the hostage, said in a hushed voice. Duque, who works in Colombia's Congress, said all the passengers were herded to the rear of the Dash-8 plane while a priest spoke with the hijackers in the front. Duque said the older hijacker boarded the plane in a wheelchair. The wheelchair was too large to pass through a metal detector at the Florencia airport, and the man was not patted down by security agents, Luis Octavio Rojas, the airport's director, told AP. "But they did give him and the chair a visual inspection," Rojas said. Among those on the plane was congressman Antonio Serrano, his assistant, Consuelo Barragan, told RCN television. It was the second time an Aires flight has been hijacked on the same route. In February 2002, members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia hijacked an Aires plane flying from Florencia to Bogota, forced it to land on a rural highway and kidnapped a Colombian senator who was aboard. Other passengers and the crew were left alone. That hijacking led the government to cancel peace talks with the rebel group, which has been waging war in this Andean nation for four decades. The senator, Jorge Gechen Turbay, president of the Senate's peace commission, remains a hostage.
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