CANBERRA -- Australia summoned France's ambassador Monday to demand an explanation for French commandos' raid on a Greenpeace ship in international waters.
Ambassador Dominique Girard said French forces were justified in boarding the MV Greenpeace outside the nuclear testing site's exclusion zone as the ship's helicopter had breached the zone.
"It was obvious that [MV Greenpeace] had put itself in a bad situation from a legal point of view, so it was quite normal," for the raid to go ahead, he told reporters after his appearance at the Australian foreign ministry.
French commandos on Friday seized the Greenpeace ships Rainbow Warrior and MV Greenpeace in waters around France's Mururoa Atoll nuclear testing site. They damaged the ships' equipment and detained those on board.
France's planned resumption of tests at its French Polynesian test site, which is believed to be imminent, has provoked outrage in Australia and around the world.
On Sunday, a mentally disturbed Spaniard quoting the Ten Commandments and protesting against the revival of French tests was arrested after hijacking a plane with about 300 people on board.
The 33-year-old man was overcome by police who rushed into the plane's cockpit about 90 minutes after he forced the French Air Inter Airbus to land at Geneva airport. The plane had been on its way from the Spanish island of Mallorca to Paris.
The hijacker had earlier released some 290 passengers unharmed. There were no injuries among the nine crew members. The man surrendered without a struggle, authorities said.
Jean-Phillippe Maitre, president of Geneva airport authority, said the man had given a flight attendant a note denouncing the planned resumption of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific and what he saw as Spanish complicity.
The hijacker threatened to blow up the plane with a remote-controlled device -- which subsequently turned out to be a mobile telephone with batteries sticking out. No explosives were found on board, said Maitre.
"It really was an isolated act by a person acting on his own, for motives probably resulting from his own imbalance," he said.
In his note, the man had quoted one of the Ten Commandments -- notably "Thou Shalt Not Kill," said Maitre.
"To put it politely, the man isn't all there," Maitre told a news conference.
France's plans to resume nuclear testing have prompted a wave of international protests, some of them violent.
However, one of the main environmental groups, Greenpeace, condemned the hijack.
Greenpeace Executive Director Steve d'Esposito appealed to the public in a statement "to continue making their opposition known, but peacefully."
He said many people "would doubtless feel deeply angered and frustrated" because of France's refusals to scratch the test plans. But "violence against French citizens and property are not an appropriate or acceptable response," said d'Esposito. ()
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