His commanders refused to approve the plan. One of them called him a fool. But 60 years ago, Sojo A. defied them and marched into the cockpit of a passenger plane.

I said to the pilot, this is your life-warning; if you don't obey my instructions, this grenade will explode in seven seconds. I removed the pin from the grenade and I showed it to him. I started counting, and when got to 3, he asked me to stop.

Sojo A's plan was to steal the plane and use it to transport weapons for the Karen rebel group who were fighting to break away from the Burmese state. These were the rebels who were supposed to be waiting for the hijacked plane on the ground.

I asked the pilot to fly to the R. territory, but we couldn't find the spot. The other side is what supposed to be a range of temporary landing ground and marked with a big sheet of paper. But we couldn't find them.

So the mission ended in glorious failure with the plane landing on a beach and the hijackers disappearing into the bush with money they stole. It was front-page news at the time but was then suppressed by successive military governments.

For decades Burmese story-making has been heavily censored, so, this sort of story about ethnic rebels taking over a government-owned plane would never have been made or shown here. But there are now some signs that things are starting to change.

A hijacking has now been made into a film, this time with the approval of the Burmese Military. As he makes the final edits, the director tells me, he now feels they about to tackle subjects that were previously considered taboo.

Much of them so far have been comedies, because they are easy to get profit for centuries, and then they got money. Now we can start looking at serious things if we want these put aside from Myanmar.

Sojo. A was never caught. He became a Baptist minister and then a negotiator between the rebels and the government. Incredibly, six decades on, the Karen conflict is still unresolved.

John Affisher, BBC News, Yangon.