BELGRADE, Serbia - Nikola Kavaja, who hijacked a U.S. passenger jet in 1979 with the intention of crashing it into Yugoslav Communist Party headquarters, has died.

Kavaja, 76, died of a heart attack at his home in Belgrade late Monday, the Blic daily newspaper said. Other local media also reported his death.

The self-declared anti-communist hijacked an American Airlines Boeing 707 in New York and flew it over the Atlantic with the aim of crashing it into the party headquarters in a high-rise in the Serbian capital, Belgrade.

He abandoned his hijack mission in Ireland, saying at the time he was not sure of the exact location of the downtown party office and did not want innocent civilians to die if the jet missed the target.

Kavaja was extradited to the U.S. and spent 18 years in a federal prison on hijack charges. He was released on parole before returning to Serbia in 1999. His parole was to expire in 2019.

Kavaja claimed in a number of interviews with Serbia's newspapers that Osama bin Laden must have "stolen" his idea of crashing jets into tall buildings during the 9/11 attack in New York and Washington.

Experts said Tuesday they doubted his claim.

"There is no merit to the idea that this gentlemen's idea was stolen by Osama bin Laden," Peter Bergen, who interviewed bin Laden and wrote a book about the al-Qaida leader, said in an e-mail. He said the idea of flying planes into buildings first came up for al-Qaida in a 1995 plot to attack 11 airliners flying from Asia to the U.S.

James Lewis, a counterterrorism expert at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, said another precedent for 9/11 was an Algerian militant plot to hijack an Air France plane and fly it into the Eiffel Tower in 1994.

Kavaja also claimed that he was recruited by the CIA to kill former communist dictator Josip Broz Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 until he died in 1980, a claim Lewis called "unusual."

Many nationalist Serbs considered Kavaja a hero and a patriot, while others thought of him as a ruthless terrorist.

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AP writer Louise Watt contributed to this report from London.