{"id":1465,"date":"2025-07-17T01:13:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T01:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/1465\/"},"modified":"2025-07-17T01:13:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T01:13:08","slug":"man-charged-with-hijacking-one-day-after-flights-grounded-at-vancouver-airport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/1465\/","title":{"rendered":"Man charged with hijacking one day after flights grounded at Vancouver Airport"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A man has been charged with hijacking one day after an incident that saw flights grounded at Vancouver&#8217;s airport for a little under an hour.<\/p>\n<p>Shaheer Cassim, who was born in 1986, has been charged with one count of hijacking, according to court records online.<\/p>\n<p>On Tuesday afternoon, police arrested a man after\u00a0a small Cessna 172 plane landed at the airport around 1:45 p.m. PT on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>They said\u00a0that they had received reports around 1 p.m.\u00a0that the plane had been hijacked from Vancouver Island before entering\u00a0Vancouver International Airport (YVR) airspace.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"A line of police cars is seen behind a small plane on the tarmac.\"   src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/rogue-plane-yvr.jpg\" style=\"aspect-ratio:1.4993646759847523\" data-cy=\"image-img\"\/>RCMP say the man they arrested was the sole occupant of the plane. (Ethan Cairns\/CBC)<\/p>\n<p>No one was injured. RCMP say the man they arrested was the sole occupant of the plane.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Few details were released by police on Tuesday. Richmond\u00a0RCMP\u00a0told CBC News on Wednesday that their federal counterparts had taken over the investigation of the case.<\/p>\n<p>Under <a href=\"https:\/\/laws-lois.justice.gc.ca\/eng\/acts\/C-46\/section-76.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">the Criminal Code<\/a>, a charge of hijacking can be laid for a variety of reasons \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p>According to the Victoria International Airport, the\u00a0aircraft is operated by the Victoria Flying Club.<\/p>\n<p>NORAD scrambles fighter jets<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>NORAD said that they were deployed after reports that\u00a0the civilian pilot of a &#8220;small general aviation aircraft&#8221; was not communicating with air traffic controllers.<\/p>\n<p>However, the flight had landed before fighter jets intercepted it.<\/p>\n<p>The spokesperson did not say where\u00a0the fighter jets departed\u00a0from.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;NORAD F-15s responded to this incident as they were closest and able to be on scene the fastest,&#8221; it wrote. &#8220;CF-18s were in the process of responding, but the incident resolved before any NORAD assets arrived on station.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man has been charged with hijacking one day after an incident that saw flights grounded at Vancouver&#8217;s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-1465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}