Beijing, March 27:

A 19-year-old woman has confessed to attempting to hijack and crash a Chinese passenger plane that had to be diverted after suspicious liquid was found on board, the official Xinhua News Agency said today.

Xinhua said the woman confessed to a “terrorist” attempt on the March 7 flight to Beijing from Urumqi. The flight was diverted to Lanzhou, in neighbouring Gansu province, after one or more passengers were found with suspicious liquids.

The woman is from China’s Turkic Muslim Uighur minority, Xinhua said, and officials have called the attack part of a terror campaign to turn the region into an independent nation called East Turkestan.

No other details on the woman were given.

The woman had drained soda cans, used a syringe to fill them with gasoline and poured the contents in the plane’s bathroom, next to the fuel-filled wings, the Global Times newspaper reported yesterday.

A flight attendant who smelled the gasoline and discovered the woman was awarded $17,000 for her effort.