Murderers caned, hijacker shot dead and baby-killing disease: headlines from four decades ago
A journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history
A race to fight a mystery disease which killed thousands of infants and baffled medical experts in the US and a “tremendous reception” in Britain for a Ku Klux Klan leader hit the headlines four decades ago this week. Back in this corner of the world, a Taiwanese man was shot dead by an air marshal during an attempted hijacking of a China Airlines aircraft en route to Hong Kong.
March 12, 1978
● A hand-drawn flight map was found on a China Airlines flight engineer who was killed when he attacked the two pilots with a pair of scissors and a hammer during a flight from Taipei to Hong Kong. Investigators believed that Taiwanese national Shih Ming-cheng was attempting to divert the flight to China as he was carrying a “written plan for the hijacking”. He was shot dead by an air marshal.
Naked truth, murderous siblings and a million phones
● New ways were being devised in Hong Kong to save 850 government primary school teachers from being forced into retirement by 1980 as a result of an expected drop in enrolments. A teacher representative said there were about 28,000 pupils in government primary schools but if this figure could be raised to about 40,000, the surplus problem would be eliminated.