Nikola Kavaja, Yugoslavian anticommunist, hijacker, 75

Nikola Kavaja, photographed in March, died of a heart attack. (Bosko Karanovic/associated press)

NEW YORK - Nikola Kavaja, a Yugoslav-born anticommunist whose hatred for the dictator Josip Broz Tito spurred him to violent subversion and terrorism, including the hijacking of an airliner in 1979, died Monday in Belgrade, where he lived. Most sources indicate that he was 75.

The Serbian newspaper Blic reported that the cause was a heart attack.

In November 1978, Mr. Kavaja, then a machinist living in Paterson, N.J., was among a handful of men arrested in connection with the bombing of the suburban Chicago home of a Yugoslav diplomat three years earlier; no one was hurt in the bombing. The men were also accused of plotting to bomb a Yugoslav club in Chicago.

After Mr. Kavaja and five of the men were convicted in Chicago in May 1979, he and four of the others were released on bail. The sixth man, the Rev. Stojilko Kajevich, a Serbian Orthodox priest, remained in jail. Mr. Kavaja returned home to Paterson.

It was June 20, on an American Airlines flight to Chicago, where he was to be sentenced, that Mr. Kavaja burst into the cockpit of the Boeing 727 jetliner with a homemade bomb he had smuggled on board at La Guardia Airport and demanded Kajevich's release.

In later years, Mr. Kavaja said his intention had been to hijack the plane to Belgrade and steer it into the headquarters of the Yugoslav Communist Party, guided by Kajevich's familiarity with the street layout.

His plan may have been much more haphazard, however. News accounts of the hijacking reported that Mr. Kavaja's first demand was that he be taken to Peru. His final request was to go to South Africa, news reports said.

Instead, the plane landed in Chicago, where Mr. Kavaja released the passengers and most of the crewmembers; Kajevich was not freed from jail and expressed a desire not to be.

After the plane had been on the ground for 11 hours, Mr. Kavaja directed that it return to New York, where American Airlines had agreed to supply a larger plane, a 707, capable of making the flight to South Africa. It was a tense transfer. FBI marksmen refrained from shooting Mr. Kavaja as he walked between planes because they were worried he was carrying volatile explosives.

The plane took off and, hours later, stopped for refueling at Shannon Airport in Ireland. There, Mr. Kavaja surrendered, for reasons only he knew. He said later that he had abandoned his initial plan because, without Kajevich's knowledge of Belgrade, he was afraid he would direct the plane into the wrong building. He served 20 years in prison.

At his sentencing he said, "Kavaja Nikola has never asked mercy from anyone, because I am an anti-Communist and a soldier."

The details of Mr. Kavaja's life are difficult to verify and often clouded by his boasts. He had said he was born in 1933 in what is now Montenegro and grew up in the town of Pec. His family was separated by the Nazis during World War II and sent to prison camps in Albania. The first of the more than 17 people he killed, he said, was a wounded German soldier whom he flung down a well when he was 14.

He became an air force pilot, he said, while engaging in anticommunist violence and acts of sabotage.