LYON (France), Nov 27: A mentally disturbed former policeman made a failed bid to hijack an Alitalia flight from the Italian city of Bologna to Paris on Monday, officials and the airline said.

Police arrested Italian Stefano Savorani, aged around 30, after the plane carrying at least 57 passengers was diverted and landed at Saint Exupery airport in the southern French city of Lyon.

During the short, confused drama, Savorani variously claimed to be hijacking the plane in the name of the Al Qaeda group and staging a terrorist action “against (Osama) bin Laden”.

His mother told Italian news agencies her son was schizophrenic and had been receiving treatment following several previous hijacking attempts. “Oh my God, he did the same thing before,” she said when told of the latest incident.

Savorani threatened to blow up a Marseille-to-Paris flight in 1999. In that case, he brandished a fake remote-control bomb detonator. The plane landed at Paris’s Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport and he surrendered after a three-hour standoff.

In Wednesday’s attempted hijacking, Savorani sprang from his seat in mid-flight and shouted “I am a terrorist, I am part of al Qaeda,” French LCI television reported. It soon emerged the device in his hand was a remote control device, possibly for a television, police sources said.

An official of the Italian air controllers authority said the hijacker wanted to stage a terrorist action “against bin Laden”. But it was unclear what this meant.

Fernando Petrasso, a spokesman for the Italian air controllers authority (ENAV), said the hijacker struck while the plane was in French airspace and the plane was immediately diverted to Lyon.

“This was an isolated act from a clearly disturbed person,” Guillot Yves, chief of police for the Rhone region, told a news conference in Lyon.

He said it was the pilot who had made the decision to divert the jet to Lyon. He said the pilot had a conversation with the hijacker but gave no details of what they said.—Reuters