Ground state energy and mass gap of a generalised quantum spin ladder

We show that a 2-leg ladder hamiltonian introduced recently by Albeverio and Fei (cond-mat/9807341) can be made to satisfy the Hecke algebra. As a result we have found an equivalent representation of the eigenspectrum in terms of the spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic XXZ chain at $\Delta = - 5/3$. The values of thermodynamic quantities such as the ground state energy and mass gap follow from the known XXZ results.