George Wright tells his story of hijack and 41 years on the run

Knowing the Americans,I always feared that they had their antennas up, he said in a two-hour interview in this village outside Lisbon where he was arrested last month. Sitting at his kitchen table,he wore sweat pants,plastic sandals and the ankle bracelet ordered by a Portuguese judge who moved him from a Lisbon jail to house arrest while he fights extradition to the US.

Wright,68,was convicted in a 1962 murder in New Jersey an armed robbery that netted him $70 but left Walter Patterson,a gas station owner and decorated WWII veteran,dead. He escaped from prison in 1970,and in 1972,dressed as a priest,he hijacked a Miami-bound jetliner and demanded it be flown to Algeria. He pulled a gun from a hollowed-out Bible he carried aboard and held it to a flight attendants head.

The interview provided an account of his odyssey since the hijacking. Wright who is fighting extradition under his assumed Portuguese identity of José Luís Jorge dos Santos talked about how he married a Portuguese woman he met at a nightclub 30 years ago and done odd jobs,working as a teacher in Western Africa and more recently decorating houses,as well as selling chicken in Portugal. He said he lifted weights and rode an exercise cycle before breakfast most days,and read the Bible I got rebaptised in 2002, he said.

But he remained defiant toward US law enforcement,which tracked him down from fingerprints in Portugals national identity database. Noting that he had renewed his Portuguese identification card in 2004,Wright wondered why it had taken the authorities so long to apprehend him.

Its a little absurd for the Americans to come hunting me and making me look like the most evil man in the world,out of some horror movie, he said. I really should be a role model of rehabilitation.

He described how the hijackers chose Algeria because Eldridge Cleaver was there,representing the black liberation movement. He also described his frustration when Algerian authorities made them give back the ransom money and proved to be less committed to promoting black rights than he had assumed.

And he denied his role in the shooting that sent him to prison in the first place,saying he never pulled the trigger It was a robbery that went wrong, he said,insisting it was the first crime he had committed. He needed money because,he said,his wallet and other belongings had been stolen from a hotel room in which he had been staying.

Wright was caught a few days later and was eventually sentenced to 15 to 30 years. But after seven years of prison transfers and ending up in what is now Bayside State Prison in New Jersey,he and three other inmates escaped.

We just went across the street to where the warden lived, he said. One of the guys was a very good mechanic. We wired his vehicle,and off we went.

Wright moved to Detroit,where he assumed the name Larry Burgess and managed a restaurant. He was laid off,he said,and could not find work. In a decent job, he said,you had to be fingerprinted,so we werent up for that.

He said he decided to get involved with the struggle as part of the Black Panther Party,and concluded the hijacking would both show sincerity and get money for the Black Liberation Army. Wright boarded Delta Flight 841 in Detroit dressed as a priest to not attract attention.

Wright demanded the money,saying over the cockpit radio,If that money is not here by 2 oclock,Im going to start throwing a dead body out the door every minute. The passengers were exchanged for the $1 million,delivered by federal agents in swimsuits outfits the hijackers demanded,he said,because in conventional clothing they could have come with weapons and made some sort of takeover attempt. The plane then flew to Boston before going on to Algiers.