Hijacking Trial Places Pakistan in a Tough Spot

Salman Ali Turki, on trial here with four other Arabs for hijacking a Pan American World Airways jetliner and killing 20 passengers in Karachi last year, said that he had a “message” for Pakistan.

But his comment during a recent interview at the maximum security central jail here where the trial is taking place sounded more like a threat.

“I have a message to the Pakistan government,” Turki said. “You will be in a hard position. Your choice is to satisfy the American government by hanging us, or to satisfy what you claim is your friendship and support for the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian people will never forget what you do.”

Source of Tension

Turki--possibly not his real name--is a mysterious, 32-year-old, English-speaking self-described Palestinian who traveled on Libyan and Moroccan passports. Prosecutors describe him as the mastermind of the Sept. 5, 1986, hijacking that ended in a bloody massacre after the hijackers panicked and opened fire on the plane’s 389 passengers and cabin crew.

In his “message” to the Pakistani government, Turki put his finger on the main source of tension in the trial that started last week:

Pakistan is the first Muslim nation supportive of the Palestinian cause that has put Palestinians on public trial for hijacking. Pakistan recognizes the Palestine Liberation Organization as the official representative of the Palestinian people.

Although U.S. officials have praised Pakistan for its firm stand against terrorism, the trial places Pakistan in an uncomfortable, vulnerable position with pro-Palestinian forces. The implication of Turki’s message seemed to be that, with this prosecution, Pakistan might also find itself a target of future terrorism.

(Kuwait three years ago convicted 17 pro-Iranian Shia Muslims of bombing the U.S. and French embassies and other targets in the Persian Gulf emirate in 1983. Islamic Jihad, a radical Shia terrorist group holding American and other foreign hostages in Lebanon, has repeatedly demanded that Kuwait free the 17. Kuwait has refused.)

“We have arrested our Palestinian brothers for hijacking the airplane of our American friends,” was the wry observation of Salman Taseer, a Lahore leader in the opposition Pakistan People’s Party who is enjoying the discomfort of the government in the hijacking case.

Public records here, as well as court proceedings before District Judge Said Mohammed Sar Babar and an interview with the defendants, offer a rare glimpse inside the planning and execution of a terrorist act.

They show that Turki developed and directed a detailed, well-funded, master plan for the hijacking. He made two earlier trips to Pakistan--one nearly a year before the hijacking--during which he acquired ammunition and explosives in local tribal markets before recruiting younger Palestinians, including one teen-ager, to carry out the hijacking.

The plan also included such touches as airport security uniforms with badges for the hijackers and a van outfitted as a security vehicle, complete with a siren and an official-looking “Texas Sheriffs’ Assn.” decal on the hood.

The four hijackers drove unchallenged through an airport security gate and stormed the plane as it was boarding passengers for a flight to Frankfurt, West Germany, and then to New York. The hijackers shot a naturalized American, Rajesh Kumar, 29, of Huntington Beach, Calif., almost immediately and dumped his body on the tarmac. Kumar was apparently singled out for execution because of his nationality.

The cockpit crew escaped, and the hijackers held the Boeing 747’s occupants at gunpoint for 16 hours while Pakistani commandos gathered on the airport tarmac. Then as it grew dark, the plane’s auxiliary power unit apparently ran low on fuel, and the lights in the cabin dimmed and went out. The hijackers panicked and opened fire with automatic weapons and hand grenades, and the troops arrived a few minutes later to end the ordeal.

Turki did not take part directly in the hijacking but was arrested a week later as he attempted to leave the country, using a Libyan passport. He had used the same passport to enter Pakistan 45 days earlier on an “official government visit” visa granted him by the Pakistani Embassy in Tripoli, Libya.

All five men--including Palestinians identified in court records as Mustafa Bomer, 22; Fahd Jassim, 18; Khalil Kiwan, 21, and Mansoor Rashid, 21--are charged with hijacking the Pan Am jumbo jet, murdering 20 passengers and attempting to murder 31 others, who were wounded in the bloody conclusion. The punishment for hijacking in Pakistan is death by hanging.

The trial is being conducted under intense security in Pakistan’s most secure jail, surrounded by an electrified fence charged with 11,000 volts, and monitored from the air by circling helicopters.

The team of attorneys appointed to prosecute the case finds itself caught between public sympathies for the Palestinian cause and public abhorrence of terrorism.

In a recent interview, chief government attorney Mian Aftab Farrukh, a respected retired High Court judge, said of the hijackers: “My impression is that they have suffered so much in refugee camps that they do not really care for their lives. Their mission was a suicide mission. I would say they are dedicated freedom fighters who have done a rash act of terrorism.”

Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq described them shortly after the hijacking as “very motivated and highly volatile youngsters.”

Farrukh was critical of the Pan Am jet’s three-man flight crew--all Americans--who escaped from an emergency window in the cockpit before the hijackers could reach them. (A Pan Am spokesman at the time said that the airline had instructed crew members to escape, if possible, so that hijacked planes would be immobilized.)

“If the crew had not acted cowardly and stayed with the ship in the naval tradition, they would have saved many lives,” Farrukh said. He suggested that the bloodshed--with the exception of the Kumar killing--could have been avoided if the hijackers’ demands to fly to Cyprus and obtain the release of Palestinian terrorists imprisoned there had been granted.

“They only wanted to fly to Cyprus and obtain the release of their friends,” he said. “There is a strong possibility that many lives would have been saved.”

Nonetheless, Farrukh, 57, said he intends to continue to earnestly prosecute the hijackers in the makeshift courtroom at Rawalpindi Central Jail, where the defendants sit in handcuffs and leg fetters, each chained to a police guard.

One consequence of the somewhat cautious prosecution, however, is that it is unlikely to delve into any international connections that may have been involved in the hijacking, such as Turki’s ties with Libya.

“There is no evidence of broader conspiracy,” Farrukh flatly told an interviewer.

U.S. officials here and in Washington disagree. “There is a Libyan connection and the Libyan connection is a Libyan,” one official said cryptically.

State Department officials attribute the hijacking to the Libya-based terrorist group headed by Abu Nidal, one of the world’s most notorious Palestinian terrorists.

The fact that the hijackers of an American airplane are being prosecuted in a Muslim country that backs the PLO is considered a major advance by most American officials, who consequently have maintained a very low profile. The Justice Department, as is common in such cases, has offered assistance in gathering evidence.

Americans monitoring the case are sensitive to the difficulties it presents for the government of President Zia.

“If Zia hangs these guys, he’s going to have Abu Nidal on his back,” said Eugene Mastrangelo, a terrorism analyst for Business Risks International Inc. in Washington. “If he lets them walk, not only will he have real problems with the U.S., but he’ll heighten real concerns (about security) among his own population.”

In a recent hourlong interview in the Rawalpindi jail, the accused hijackers said they were members of a group called Palestine Revolution. During the hijacking, they identified themselves to passengers as members of Arab Liberation Organization Against Imperialism. Both groups, if they exist, are obscure.

“Our organization is very secret,” said Turki, a stocky, bearded man with close-cropped black hair. “We work underground. Maybe in the future it will be known.”

However, the hijackers and their leader were linked by their demands to a chain of terrorist acts and subsequent reactions by the Israeli government.

Their declared purpose was to obtain the release of three gunmen convicted of killing an Israeli couple and a third person on a yacht moored in Larnaca, Cyprus, in September, 1985. The Cyprus gunmen, two Palestinians and a pro-Palestinian Briton who called themselves Force 17 wanted freedom for about 20 Palestinians intercepted by Israeli gunboats in August, 1985, while sailing off Sidon, Lebanon. Israel said they were saboteurs.

The Larnaca killings prompted Israel to bomb the PLO headquarters in Tunisia, killing about 70 people.

According to court records here, Turki, using a Moroccan passport and the name Bou Baker Mohammed, first came to Pakistan on Oct. 18, 1985. He stayed for 25 days in hotels in Karachi; in Peshawar, the frontier city where guns and ammunition can readily be purchased; and in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

He left the country and returned 10 days later on the Moroccan passport and stayed another 32 days, this time visiting Lahore and Rawalpindi as well as Peshawar and Karachi.

He came back again July 22, 1986, this time on a Libyan passport bearing the name Fulsalman Ali Turki, and remained until after the hijacking and his subsequent arrest at the Islamabad airport.

Court testimony has connected him with the purchases of fixtures for the Suzuki van used in the hijacking and of uniforms for the hijackers, and court records show he revealed the locations of arms he had stashed in Pakistan.

Turki claims to be the son of a Jerusalem businessman exiled to a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan after the Six-Day War in 1967. The other four accused hijackers all appear to be drawn from the festering background of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.

Rashid said he was born and reared in the Chatilla refugee camp outside Beirut, where he said his mother and brother were killed when Lebanese Christian militiamen invaded the camp and carried out a massacre in 1982.

Kiwan, a dark-complexioned, studious-appearing man in a Muslim skull cap and spectacles, came from the Ein el Hilwa refugee camp near Sidon, where he said he was jailed by the Israelis during their invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

The youngest, Jassim, who was only 17 during the hijacking, also said he came from Chatilla. “We lived a miserable life,” he said, speaking good English. “Once a Palestinian is born . . . it is a duty for him to fight for the sake of his Palestinian country.”

Bomer, the man who acted as leader of the group during the hijacking, said he came from a refugee camp near Damascus, the Syrian capital. Witnesses have identified Bomer as the hijacker who first opened fire on passengers massed in the darkened aircraft cabin.

The hijackers assert that the killing was actually committed by Pakistani army commandos outside the plane. But the commandos were several hundred yards away from the plane when the shooting began, and they did not arrive until at least five minutes later.

Pakistan will attempt to show that it was a massacre that occurred, in Farrukh’s words, when “they just got panicky” after the plane’s lights dimmed.

According to Turki, if there was a massacre, it was carried out in retaliation for other massacres the Palestinians have witnessed.

“We have seen many things,” Turki said. “That is why we joined the Palestinian revolution and started to fight.”

Times staff writer Melissa Healy, in Washington, contributed to this story.