All 4 Hijackers Alive and in Custody, Pakistanis Say

All four Arab hijackers who seized a Pan American World Airways jumbo jet Friday and opened fire on passengers inside the cabin are alive and in custody, Pakistan officials said Saturday.

Airport security force commander Tariq Rafi said that earlier statements by Pakistani officials that two of the hijackers had been killed were not true.

Rafi said all four of the hijackers, aged between 19 and 24, are being interrogated by the Pakistani directorate of military intelligence at an undisclosed location.

Only one of them, identified as Bomer Hussein, 24, was wounded, law enforcement sources said. Hussein, spokesman for the hijackers, used the name Mustafa during the 16-hour hijacking ordeal. He received two bullet wounds in the chest when army and police fought the hijackers to regain control of the aircraft Friday night, police sources said.

Police officials said all four hijackers came to Pakistan on fake Bahraini passports. They released only one name for each of the other three hijackers--Walid, Ismael and Abdullah. Police said all are believed to have come to Pakistan from Lebanon, although airport security chief Rafi said their nationalities are Syrian, Palestinian, and Bahraini.

The four, dressed as airport security guards, drove up to Pan Am Flight 73 early Friday morning as passengers were boarding the Boeing 747. They stormed aboard, taking 384 passengers, cabin crew and airline ground workers hostage.

The hijackers initially demanded to be flown to Cyprus in a move to gain the freedom of Palestinian terrorists jailed there. The plane’s cockpit crew, however, quickly escaped through a hatch in the roof, immobilizing the plane.

As negotiations for a new crew went on, the hijackers reinforced their demand by shooting a 29-year-old American businessman, Rajesh Kumar of Huntington Beach, Calif., in the head, and throwing his body out onto the tarmac.

One surviving passenger interviewed Saturday contended that Kumar had angered the hijackers by protesting their rough handling of a stewardess in the early stages of the hijacking.

The hijacking ended 16 hours later when the fuel for the plane’s auxiliary power unit was exhausted and its lights went out. The hijackers herded the passengers to the center of the aircraft and then opened fire and hurled grenades at them. Hostages opened the aircraft’s doors and the survivors fled.

Pakistani officials said at least 15 people were killed in the final act of violence, among them two more Americans. Hospitals reported 127 injured. White House officials said 17 of the injured are Americans.

(In Cambridge, Mass., a Harvard University spokesman said Syed Nesar Ahmad, of Arlington, Mass., whose wife is an assistant professor at Harvard, was one of the Americans killed, Associated Press reported. Ahmad was returning from an academic conference in Pakistan).

5 Bodies Unidentified

The nationalities of five of the deceased had still not been established late Saturday as a U.S. Air Force C-141 aircraft arrived to ferry 11 of the most seriously wounded to hospitals in Wiesbaden, West Germany.

The plane was dispatched from Rhein-Main Air Base early Saturday with two five-member medical teams and a group of psychologists and psychiatrists to evaluate specific needs among surviving passengers.

Michael Austrian, public affairs director for the State Department’s Near East and South Asia bureau, said in Wiesbaden that only four of the 11 injured passengers being evacuated are American. The other casualties aboard are three Britons, two West Germans, an Italian and an Austrian.

Six others, presumably uninjured family members of the wounded evacuees, were also listed as aboard the C-141.

Three of the Americans were scheduled to be taken to the Air Force Regional Medical Center in Wiesbaden, while the fourth will be sent to a U.S. Army hospital at Landstuhl, south of Frankfurt, which specializes in burn injuries and neurosurgery.

The West Europeans will be admitted to civilian hospitals in the Frankfurt area, Austrian said. Neither he nor U.S. military officials were able to provide any details of the injuries to those aboard the C-141.

“We only know they’re seriously injured, and they are all litter cases,” he said.

Another Plane Sent

Pan Am sent a plane to allow the 250 or 300 uninjured passengers to complete their journeys. Austrian said the passengers would be asked to cooperate with U.S. officials to determine additional details of the hijacking.

“These people are private citizens and they don’t have to help, but we’d like to talk with them further to better understand exactly how the hijack took place,” Austrian said.

The passengers also will be offered medical advice about how best to deal with post-hijacking trauma.

Meanwhile, U.S. and Pakistani officials confirmed Saturday that a planned attack by the commandos to free the aircraft had not yet begun when the four hijackers began firing at their hostages.

Pakistan had received backing from the “highest authority” in the U.S. government to storm the airliner, a U.S. official here said Saturday.

“At some point during the day (Friday),” the U.S. official here said, “the government of Pakistan decided not to let the plane go.”

Three main factors, Pakistani and U.S. officials said, led to the decision not to consider allowing the plane to leave. First, the hijackers had demonstrated a capacity for violence when they killed Kumar.

Second, the government of Cyprus had denied landing rights to the aircraft. “They said no, no, and hell no,” said a U.S. official involved in the discussions.

Threatened an Explosion

Finally, the Pakistani government was alarmed by the hijackers’ claim that they were carrying explosives that could possibly be detonated in flight, killing all those on board.

At about 6:30 p.m. Friday, the U.S. Consulate in Karachi received a query from senior Pakistani officials.

“Would you back us,” the Pakistani officials reportedly asked consulate officials, “if we took an action that might result in violence?”

It took only 15 minutes, a U.S. official involved in the discussions reported, for a promise of support to come from Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead. However, the official said, the positive response was also approved at the “highest authority,” suggesting that either President Reagan or Secretary of State George P. Shultz was involved.

Despite the Pakistani resolve and the go-ahead from Washington, however, the commando attack was never launched.

As the civilian-garbed Pakistani army special commando forces massed for an attack near the aircraft, the hijacked plane’s generator failed, plunging the cabin into darkness and causing the hijackers to panic and begin shooting.

10-Minute Lapse

Caught off guard by the sudden firing inside the plane, it took the commandos more than 10 minutes to reach the plane and begin helping with the rescue, according to Pakistan Civil Aviation Director Kurshid Anwar Mirza.

“The commandos were some distance away,” said Mirza, who said he was on the tarmac when the firing started and passengers began streaming from the plane on emergency chutes and by jumping from the wings. “Several minutes elapsed before the first cordon of police and army commandos arrived. I don’t think anybody climbed onto the aircraft in any substantial force until 15 or 20 minutes later.”

Saturday’s report by Mirza clashed with his account of the night before, when in a press briefing he had asserted that the “commando action started as planned and was very successful.” At that time, he said, the commandos timed their assault on the failure of the airplane’s generator and turned off tarmac lights to leave the plane in total darkness for the attack.

However, the new account more closely matched the reports of surviving passengers who said they saw no commando presence when they first left the aircraft, and also with the physical condition of the plane, which showed no evidence of incoming fire on its exterior when it was inspected by reporters Saturday morning. However, there were several dozen holes obviously made by bullets and grenade shrapnel.

Only 2 Chutes Functioned

A tour of the outside of the airplane revealed that only two of the plane’s 10 escape chutes had functioned. Clothing and possessions of fleeing passengers lay draped on wings and hung from open doors. The tiny sneaker of a small child rested on the starboard wing flap, and long streaks of blood marked the escape chutes.

Pakistani authorities released more details about how the hijackers had managed to get onto the tarmac by disguising themselves as airport security officers. They apparently modified a Suzuki van to look like a police vehicle so they could enter the apron area of the Karachi Airport where the Pan Am plane, named Empress of the Seas, was boarding passengers.

Six officers, including the two guards at a cargo gate who waved the disguised police van onto the tarmac, have been suspended from duty pending an investigation into security failures at the airport. At least three other people--a man who helped the hijackers to lease the van, the tailor who sewed their fake police uniforms and the man who owns the van--have been arrested as accessories.

Information about the hijackers remains sketchy, however. Most of what is known concerns Hussein, the spokesman.

Hussein’s birthday is Sept. 5, the day of the hijacking. He entered Pakistan on Aug. 17 with a Bahrain passport. The same day, he checked into the Karachi Taj Mahal Hotel, one of the city’s more expensive, with a single room rate of about $46.

Fondness for Hamburgers

Taj Mahal front office manager Peter Antao described Hussein as a tall, quiet guest who appeared to have money to spend: When he was asked to make a room deposit, he paid $400 cash. His total room bill for his 18-day stay was $1,000. His room service tab revealed a fondness for hamburgers and spaghetti.

During his stay at the hotel he made only six local calls and no international telephone calls. He had only one visitor that the hotel staff remembered, a Pakistani Christian named Jacob Kenndy, 25. According to police, Kenndy arranged for Hussein to lease a van on Aug. 28 at a rate of $30 a day and for a security advance of $1,300.

After he obtained the van, police said, Hussein and his co-hijackers, who apparently stayed at other hotels, painted it a blue-gray similar to the vehicles driven by the airport security police. They hired a tailor in a Karachi slum to make them airport security police uniforms. They bought stars and epaulets from a market in the city for their uniform sleeves and shoulders.

By the time they had added a siren, rooftop lights and speaker to their Suzuki van, it was an exact replica of a Pakistan airport security force patrol van. In this, they drove onto the tarmac without ever being questioned by the airport police.

Retrieved His Passport

The last time the hotel staff saw Hussein, Antao said, was at about 8 p.m. Thursday, the eve of the hijacking. At that time, Hussein asked for his passport, which had been left at the hotel as security for his hotel room, and made the advance payment on his bill. When police inspected Hussein’s room on the day of the hijacking, they found one sports shirt, a few Arabic magazines and some shaving gear.

Information about the exact number of Americans hurt or involved in the hijacking also continued to be vague. At Wiesbaden, State Department spokesman Austrian blamed the continued confusion in part on imprecise passenger lists compiled by the airline and the fact that survivors were dispersed at eight locations in Karachi.

“We believe there were 83 Americans on board or checked in,” he said. “But a significant number of these were not on board.” He said as many as 41 may have been in the transit lounge or aboard buses on the way to the plane when the hijacking began.

There were also no exact figures on the total number of Americans injured, or if there were any Americans among those in Karachi hospitals judged too seriously wounded to evacuate.

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall, in Wiesbaden, contributed to this report.