Meanwhile, the passengers of a Turkish Airlines (THY) plane to Italy flew back to Istanbul Wednesday with tales of a relatively calm and chatty experience.
Interior minister Giuliano Amato, speaking before a special session of the Italian Senate, admitted that "we all had in mind the Pope's visit to Turkey in the coming weeks."
Amato said that the November 28 to 30 trip to mainly Muslim Turkey would "surely present delicate security problems," but added: "It is difficult to see in this episode [the hijacking] something that will aggravate these security problems."
The unarmed hijacker, 28-year-old Hakan Ekinci, entered the cockpit about 20 minutes after take-off from Tirana en route to Istanbul and threatened the pilots with a parcel that he said contained a bomb, according to Turkish officials.
"The hijacker forced his way into the cockpit as the chief flight attendant was serving us. He pushed her into my lap and I tried to push him out, but failed. He was a big fellow," pilot Mursel Gokalp told a press conference at Ataturk airport. "He said 'I'm not going to hurt anyone'."
Some passengers did not realize that they were hijacked until they turned on their cell phones, said Turkish traveler, Halil Demir. "When we landed, we turned on our mobile telephones and we began receiving messages [from relatives] that we had been hijacked," he said.
"Thank God, this affair ended without anything serious happening," said another passenger, Ergun Erkoseoglu, a burly, bearded Turk in T-shirt and baseball cap who spent much of the ordeal on his cell phone with the newsroom of the NTV news channel.
Erkoseoglu, who said that he was sitting in the front of the plane, said that he saw the hijacker enter the cockpit after pushing aside a flight attendant, but said that passengers suspected nothing until the plane landed at the southern Italian city of Brindisi.
The hijacker "apologized and wished us good night" before the pilot led him out to surrender to the Italian police, passengers said.
The Turkish and mostly Albanian travelers aboard the flight spoke to the media and their friends and relatives by cell phone throughout the standoff. At one point, they were heard on television - through Erkoseoglu's phone - breaking into applause as the hijacker apologized and bade farewell to the passengers before surrendering.
Senior THY officials greeted the plane bringing the passengers back from Brindisi. All of the 113 people on board the hijacked Boeing 737-400, except for the hijacker and a traveler who chose to stay in Italy, were flown to Istanbul.
Amato revealed Wednesday that the hijacker had learned pilots' alarm codes on the Internet. The captain said that the hijacker ordered him "to insert the code corresponding to a hijacking and not that of a general alert," Amato said, according to the ANSA news agency. "I don't know how many of you would have known that but not me."
He also said that although Ekinci claimed to have a letter for the Pope, investigators found "no document in his possession addressed to the Holy Father." Ekinci told Italian investigators that "he feared for his life in Turkey after adopting the Christian religion," Amato said.
Ekinci is reportedly a convert to Christianity and a conscientious objector who wrote to the Pope in late August seeking his help in avoiding military service, which is obligatory in Turkey.
He was initially reported to have carried out the hijacking to protest against Benedict XVI's planned Turkey trip, but turned out instead to be an army deserter who was being deported from Albania where he had unsuccessfully sought asylum, according to Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler.
Ekinci, who deserted in May while on a one-day furlough from his Istanbul garrison and fled to Albania, is also reportedly seeking asylum in Italy.
At the Vatican meanwhile, the Pope made no mention of the hijacking during his weekly Wednesday audience in St. Peter's Square after returning home from his summer residence in Castelgandolfo.
But Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Vatican "ministry" for culture and inter-faith dialogue, told Wednesday's La Repubblica: "Predictions cannot be made and it doesn't make sense to use reason to analyze irrational events. But the [Pope's] trip has to be made, there is no doubt."
Benedict XVI, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, sparked a furor across the Muslim world last month over a speech that he made in Germany linking violence and Islam.
Quoting a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor on the Prophet Mohammed, founder of the Muslim faith, the Pope said: "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached'."
The Pope has repeatedly apologized for unleashing the storm of protest through the remarks, which cast a pall over the planned trip to Turkey, his first visit to a Muslim country - though a strictly secular one - since being elected Pope in April 2005.
Benedict is already seen in Turkey as the anti-Turkish Pope for opposing Ankara's drive to join the European Union as "a grave error ... against the tide of history" when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Deepening the sense of foreboding, a novel was published in Turkey in May titled Assassination of a Pope - Who Will Kill Benedict XVI in Istanbul? The author, Yucel Kaya, reportedly told Turkey's Catholic leadership that the book merely captured the mood of the country.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse