2 Hijackers Shot on Soviet Plane; 4 Others Killed

Two men seized a Soviet airliner at a Ural Mountains airport in an aborted weekend hijacking in which the two gunmen, two passengers and two policemen were killed, Tass press agency said today. It said the men were drug addicts.

Tass said that, before commandeering the TU-134 Aeroflot plane with 76 passengers aboard early Saturday, the hijackers shot and killed two police officers during a car chase to the airport.

The thwarted hijacking occurred at the airport in Ufa, capital of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, about 700 miles east of Moscow. The plane apparently never left the ground before it was stormed and retaken by security agents.

Details were not complete, but Tass said “two armed criminals” whom it identified as N. R. Mantsev and S. V. Yagmurzhi were chased through the city of Ufa toward the airport in a taxicab they had seized.

The hijackers killed militia Senior Sgt. Z. N. Akhtyamov and Junior Sgt. A. G. Galeyev, the report said.

Storm Aboard Airliner

At the airport, Mantsev and Yagmurzhi stormed aboard the TU-134, which was bound from Kiev to the city of Nizhnevartovsk, Tass said.

“During the seizure of the plane, the criminals opened fire and killed two passengers,” it said.

Security police and uniformed militia undertook “decisive measures” to recapture the plane, Tass said, indicating that they stormed the aircraft while it was still on the runway.