Welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Jill Achinicku.

Today we're looking back at the first plane hijack in Nigeria's history.

It's first thing in the morning under 25th of October 1993.

Albert Tassiobe, an aircraft engineer, is sitting in first class on an Nigeria-always flight from Lagos to Abuja.

One young man came out of the cockpit and he announced to the whole cabin that the aircraft has been hijacked,

that we were headed for Frankfurt.

In June, Nigeria's first election after 10 years of military rule had been annulled,

and the military had installed in new government, led by President Ernest Shunakon.

Since then, the country has been lurching from crisis to crisis,

embroiled in weeks of protest and strikes at times at the edge of civil war.

The hijackers were four young men from the movement for the advancement of democracy or mad.

They opposed the annulment of the June 12 election and demanded Shunakon's removal,

but they had commanded little national recognition.

hijacking the plane was an effort to grab the spotlight

and it trust passengers like Albert Tassiobe into the centre of a violent political emergency.

Before he could finish the announcement, two other chaps came from behind

with these five litre cakes of petrol and they started splashing it all over the aircraft,

both on our bodies, you know, on everything and then brought out a lighter.

That if anybody misbehaved, it will only take a second for them to explode the whole aircraft.

So you can imagine everybody was tensed up, you know, people were scared.

The plane had more than a hundred passengers on board.

There were foreign dignitaries, including a Chinese trade mission and prominent Nigerian officials.

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