Zvonko Busic, a Croatian nationalist who used fake explosives in 1976 to hijack a Trans World Airlines flight out of La Guardia Airport in New York and planted a real bomb beneath Grand Central Terminal that killed a police officer, was found dead at his home in Rovanjska, Croatia, on Sunday. He was 67.

Croatian news reports said Busic had shot himself. His American-born wife, Julienne Eden Busic, found the body and a suicide note, the reports said.

Hijackings for political reasons were not uncommon in the 1960s and ’70s, but Busic’s seizure of TWA Flight 355 — an ordeal that ended in Paris 30 hours later — was the first involving a U.S. domestic flight after strict security measures were introduced at airports in the United States in 1972.

Busic, who was 30 at the time and living in Manhattan, said he wanted to draw attention to Croatia’s struggle for independence from Tito’s Yugoslavia.

He and his wife, as well as three Croatian co-conspirators who had also been living in the United States, boarded the flight on the evening of Friday, Sept. 10. The plane, a Boeing 727, was carrying more than 80 passengers and crew members bound for Chicago.

Zvonko Busic was born on Jan. 23, 1946, in Gorica, a village in Herzegovina. He met Julienne Eden Schultz, a multilingual nurse from Oregon, in Vienna in 1969. They married and moved to the United States, eventually settling on West 76th Street in Manhattan. Busic worked occasionally as a waiter.

Busic was active in politics after he returned to Croatia. On Wednesday, in Zagreb, the capital, prominent Croatian politicians joined hundreds of others in giving him a hero’s funeral.