The George Hodges Hijacking Incident
On the morning of 19 May 1989, a contingent of 174 Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres, who had been withdrawn from Angola as part of the 22 December 1988 Tripartite regional peace agreement between South Africa, Angola and Cuba towards the independence of Namibia, arrived in Dakawa, Tanzania. An estimated 7,000 African National Congress (ANC) guerrillas in Angola were supposed to be moved to bases in Tanzania and Uganda as a result of the peace accord.
The 174 guerrilla fighters were traumatised by what had occurred the previous day, 18 May 1989, in a Soviet Iluyshin 62 Aeroflot aircraft from Luanda to Dar es Salaam. As the plane entered the Tanzanian airspace, four men (one white, one so-called Coloured and two black), stood up in the aisles. The white man, Bradley Richard Stacey (aka “George Hodges”), brandished what he said was a hand grenade and ordered that the flight be diverted to Johannesburg, South Africa, because one of the passengers on board was “a Russian communist wanted in South Africa”.
George Hodges approached the cockpit of the plane waving a hand grenade, but was shot in the chest by a Soviet security officer, wounding him seriously, and the other would-be hijackers surrendered. The Tanzanian Police said they believed Hodges was an undercover agent working for the apartheid South African government.
At 14:46 local time, the plane landed at the end of the runway of the old Dar es Salaam airport, with soldie
