FRANKFURT, Jan 5: A man hijacked a light aircraft and threatened to crash into the European Central Bank tower in Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt on Sunday before landing the plane and being arrested, officials said.

The pilot told n-tv television he wanted to draw attention to a woman astronaut who died in the US space shuttle Challenger, which exploded shortly after takeoff in Jan 1986.

Frankfurt airport was closed down, tall buildings in the city evacuated and military aircraft patrolled the sky as the motorized glider circled the city for more than two hours before landing at the airport, where he was arrested.

The incident was a chilling reminder of the Sept 11, 2001, suicide attacks on the United States, but a spokesman for Germany’s air traffic control authority said he did not believe there was a terrorist link to Sunday’s incident.

“I want to make my big idol Judith Resnik famous,” the man, speaking what appeared to be native German, told n-tv after demanding to speak to the station. “I want to draw attention to the first Jewish female astronaut.”

Resnik, who died on board Challenger, was Jewish. The man did not say why he may have targeted the European Central Bank, based in Frankfurt, which sets interest rates for hundreds of millions of Europeans in 12 countries.

A spokesman for air traffic control said the armed man hijacked a plane at Babenhausen airfield, southeast of Frankfurt, in the afternoon and had taken up contact with the Frankfurt airport tower.

The plane circled the banking towers in the heart of Frankfurt, followed by a helicopter. Police had sealed off main roads, evacuated the city’s trademark tall buildings and closed bridges over the river Main.

The plane was flying just a few hundred metres off the ground and made one close pass of the Messeturm tower that houses the Reuters offices and the offices of Goldman Sachs.

The sight of an unauthorized plane flying among Frankfurt’s skyscrapers conjured up frightening images that recalled the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.—Reuters