The raid lasted only three minutes.
Japanese television showed the hijacker being led away with his face covered, and blood drenching his sleeves. When a detective and three officers tried to grab him, he fought back with the screwdriver. The hijacker, described as a Japanese man in his forties, was arrested after a struggle. Officers climbed covered ladders on the starboard side of the blue-and- white plane, entered it from three entrances and found the hijacker with a female flight attendant in the front end of the cabin.

A 24-year old woman was stabbed and four other passengers taken to hospital in the northern port town of Hakodate, 425 miles from Tokyo, but there were no serious casualties among the 350 passengers and 15 crew. Hundred of passengers were rescued by police in a dramatic raid early this morning after a man armed with a screwdriver hijacked a domestic airliner and demanded the release of Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinri Kyo religious cult. Disputes like these – over the organisation of EU work rather than substantive matters – have kept ministers arguing for years over issues like immigration, racism, drugs and terrorism.. Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, strongly opposes giving the EU’s legal arm any role in matters which he thinks best kept under national control. Because of continuing disputes about the role of the European Court of Justice the ministers were unable to agree a new convention to fight fraud in the European budget, or Europol, the new EU police agency. These would harmonise rules on ticket sales, draw up measures to exclude known or suspected hooligans, co-ordinate the use of police spotters and create a common format for police intelligence reports.In practice, attempts to make EU co-operation on legal matters work are bedevilled by doctrinal differences.

Children whose parents were not married would be left in a legal grey area, officials said. The Netherlands, Greece and Portugal are pressing hard for the new measures and the French Justice Minister, Jacques Toubon, yesterday threw his weight behind the idea.Britain put forward new proposals yesterday to co-ordinate the fight against soccer hooliganism. “A lot of children are suffering today because of this problem,” said Anita Gradin, the EU Commissioner for legal affairs. “We must fill this legal gap.”
EU justice ministers meeting yesterday in Luxembourg gave the go-ahead for new legislation. It will be added to a draft convention on jurisdiction and the execution of decisions in matrimonial matters.When a couple from different EU states divorces or separates, there are no clear rules for deciding who gets custody of the children. This leads to frequent battles between different courts, with parents sometimes taking the situation into their own hands and seizing children.However, Britain is sceptical because new rules would only cover children affected by marriage breakdown.

The European Union is to draw up new rules to help stop custody battles over the children of mixed nationality marriages. But the impossible choices remain, as summed up in one report, on the difficulties that will not go away: “Goethe – or garbage removal.”. For years, Buchenwald provided an excuse for comfortable, anti- fascist rhetoric. Now, stripped of the comfortable bombast of the Communist era, the camp’s legacy is more painful.Anne Moller, who is responsible for preparing the City of Culture for 1999, emphasises: “Weimar is a shorthand for a whole era of German and European history, with its light and dark sides – reflected in its enormous intellectual heritage, but also in the horror of Buchenwald.” Seminars on Buchenwald are high on the list of proposed events for 1999, along with the art and music festivals.For Weimar, one advantage of becoming City of Culture is that Bonn looks set to shoulder a larger share of the town’s financial burden than would otherwise be the case. The Buchenwald legacy is one that the city has confronted, in different ways, throughout recent decades. But electors showed him the door last year, not least because of a widespread belief that Klaus Buttner’s extravagant projects had left too little over for the ordinary voters. His opponent, Volkhardt Germer – formerly part of the Communist administration, who was now standing on a non-party ticket – was duly elected, on the platform “A Weimarian for Weimar.”Weimar has long been a city of ambiguities.