Escaped killer in $1m plane hijack captured in Portugal, 41 years on

It MAY have taken 41 years, but justice finally caught up with fugitive hijacker George Wright this week.

Having avoided the Federal Bureau of Investigation for more than four decades, the convicted murderer turned-escaped-black-militant was captured by local police in a Portuguese village, not far from the capital, Lisbon.

The 68-year-old now faces extradition to the US over the 1962 killing of a decorated Second World War veteran, a subsequent jail break and an audacious airplane hijacking.

In 1972, Wright, dressed as a priest and accompanied by four other members of the Black Liberation Army, took 86 passengers travelling on a Delta jet hostage. The gang collected a $1 million ransom before forcing pilots to fly to Algeria.

His accomplices were picked up by police in Paris in 1976. But Wright seemingly disappeared and his trail went cold.

That was until a new FBI task force was set up in 2002 charged with tracking down the fugitive. New leads eventually pointed towards an address in Portugal.

But it wasn’t until last week, when Portuguese authorities matched prints of the US fugitive with that of a man going by the name of Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos, that all the pieces fell into place.

While FBI agents flew to Europe, Portuguese police staked out Wright’s house, eventually swooping on Monday.

It all came as a bit of a shock to residents of Almocageme, the coastal village in which Wright had lived for more than 20 years as a man known to locals as “George”.

“He was a very nice guy. He used to wave as he drove past and I’d shout out, ‘Hey George’,”said Ricardo Salvador, a petrol station attendant. “I never imagined George was in trouble.”

Wright worked in several jobs, including a stint as a nightclub bouncer, residents said.

Married to a Portuguese woman and fluent in the language, Wright passed himself off as a native of Guinea-Bissau, a former colony, though he was, in fact, one of America’s most wanted fugitives.

In 1970, he was part of a gang of four convicts who escaped from Bayside state prison in New Jersey. At the time, Wright was eight years into a 15 to 30-year stretch for the murder of petrol station owner Walter Patterson during a robbery.

After two years hiding out with member of the underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, in Detroit, Wright took part in a brazen hijacking of a passenger jet bound for Miami.

Using the alias Reverend L Burgess and dressed in priest’s clothes, the escaped convict and his accomplices demanded a $1m ransom.

The money was delivered by FBI agents wearing nothing but swimming trunks, on the insistence of the hijackers, and the passengers were released. Throughout the hijacking, Wright and others smoked marijuana, hostages later told police.

The plane was flown to Algeria, whose then socialist government was sympathetic to the Black Panther movement in the US.

The hijackers eventually made their way to France, where most of them were picked up and jailed.

But Wright remained at large for a further 25 years.

At a court session in Lisbon on Tuesday, he asked to be released pending the outcome of a US extradition request.

It is expected Wright will try to fight a return to the US, where he would be forced to serve out the remainder of his sentence.

“Despite the passage of time, justice has been served, and George Wright will pay for his crime,” Gary Lanigan, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, said.

Ann Patterson, a daughter of Wright’s murder victim, said: “I’m so thankful that now there’s justice for daddy. He never got any kind of justice.”