A man has been charged with hijacking one day after an incident that saw flights grounded at Vancouver’s airport for a little under an hour.
Shaheer Cassim, who was born in 1986, has been charged with one count of hijacking, according to court records online.
On Tuesday afternoon, police arrested a man after a small Cessna 172 plane landed at the airport around 1:45 p.m. PT on Tuesday.
They said that they had received reports around 1 p.m. that the plane had been hijacked from Vancouver Island before entering Vancouver International Airport (YVR) airspace.
No one was injured. RCMP say the man they arrested was the sole occupant of the plane.
A YVR spokesperson told CBC News on Tuesday that flights were grounded for just under 40 minutes as a result of the alleged hijacking, and nine flights had to be diverted to other airports.
Few details were released by police on Tuesday. Richmond RCMP told CBC News on Wednesday that their federal counterparts had taken over the investigation of the case.
Under the Criminal Code, a charge of hijacking can be laid for a variety of reasons — which include confining people on board an aircraft against their will, transporting them to an unscheduled location against their will, or causing an aircraft to deviate from its flight plan.
According to the Victoria International Airport, the aircraft is operated by the Victoria Flying Club.
NORAD scrambles fighter jets
A spokesperson for the Canadian Armed Forces told CBC News in a statement that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) scrambled U.S. F-15 fighter jets in response to the alleged hijacking on Tuesday.
NORAD said that they were deployed after reports that the civilian pilot of a “small general aviation aircraft” was not communicating with air traffic controllers.
However, the flight had landed before fighter jets intercepted it.
The spokesperson did not say where the fighter jets departed from.
“NORAD F-15s responded to this incident as they were closest and able to be on scene the fastest,” it wrote. “CF-18s were in the process of responding, but the incident resolved before any NORAD assets arrived on station.”