Hijackers Free 66, Blow Up Airliner

Hijackers of a Jordanian airliner today released 57 passengers, including two Americans, and nine crew members, then fled the plane before blowing it up.

Shortly afterward, a lone hijacker commandeered a Lebanese plane en route from Beirut to Cyprus, which carried the same two Americans and six of the crew members just released from the Jordanian plane. That hijacker later left the Middle East Airlines plane with Cyprus police, and all aboard were reported safe.

The two Americans aboard both planes were Landrey Slade, a professor at American University of Beirut, and his 18-year-old son, William, a university official said. He said Slade had been trying to leave Beirut since the kidnaping of Thomas Sutherland, the university’s dean of agriculture and the fourth AUB official abducted since last December.

Eight Jordanian sky marshals aboard the first aircraft were taken away from the plane by members of Lebanon’s Shia Muslim militia, Amal, but were later released unharmed, said officials of the Jordanian airline Alia.

Red Cross officials and airport officials earlier said they had been killed in the explosion.

Munib Toukan, vice president of Alia, told reporters in Amman, Jordan: “Our manager says he has them. They’re in good health. We’re going to put them on the first flight out of Beirut.”

The pilot of the hijacked airliner, Capt. Ulf Sultan, a Swede, said the hijackers fled the plane with the sky marshals as hostages before it was blown up. “We have been assured by the hijackers that they are safe,” he said.

Bombings Last March

Teams of armed security guards have flown on all Alia flights since the airline’s offices in Athens, Rome and Vienna were bombed last March.

The plane was blown up at the end of the hijack drama.

The hijackers raked the plane with automatic weapons fire, then a series of explosions rocked the Boeing 727 and set it on fire as it stood on the airport runway.

Soon after the explosions, the plane’s fuel tanks caught fire, and it broke up into burning sections of twisted metal. Only its tail, bearing the crown of King Hussein’s Hashemite dynasty, remained intact.

The plane was hijacked in Beirut on Tuesday, stopped in Cyprus, tried twice to land in Tunisia, refueled in Sicily, returned to Beirut, attempted to fly to Syria and then came back to Beirut on Tuesday night.

The hijackers, identified as Shia Muslims of Lebanon’s Amal militia, were demanding that all Palestinian guerrillas leave Beirut for Tunisia, where Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization has its headquarters. Various reports put the number of hijackers at four or six.

The explosions came nine minutes after the hijackers’ deadline for blowing up the jetliner unless Chedli Klibi, secretary general of the 21-member Arab League, arrived to negotiate with them.

The hijackers had set a 2 p.m. deadline to begin killing passengers. Later they had threatened to blow up the plane with themselves and the hostages aboard if Klibi did not leave Tunis, Tunisia, within an hour to meet with them.