Meant to Free Passengers, Crash Jet in Israel, Hijackers Say

Five Arab men charged with hijacking a Pan American World Airways jumbo jet and killing 20 passengers said Tuesday that they had intended to release the passengers and blow up the airplane over a target in Israel.

In a statement signed by all five under the name of their leader, a self-described Palestinian who traveled on a Libyan passport, the men said they hijacked the Pan Am Boeing 747 at Karachi International Airport on Sept. 5, 1986, to free fellow Palestinians from jail and to publicize the Palestinian crusade for a separate homeland.

World Attention Sought

“We came to Pakistan to hijack an American airplane to instantly draw the whole world attention towards Palestine,” the statement said. It was read in English by their attorney, Abdul Baseer Quereshi, in the makeshift courtroom set up in the Rawalpindi central jail where they have been on trial since October.

The men face a possible death penalty. Although they admit to the hijacking, they contend that the passengers were killed by Pakistani army commandos.

U.S. officials consider the trial significant because Pakistan, a nation that recognizes the Palestine Liberation Organization as the official diplomatic representative of the Palestinian people and does not recognize Israel, is the first Muslim nation to put Palestinians on public trial for hijacking.

The trial places Pakistan in an uncomfortable position in the Muslim community of nations, a fact that has been stressed by the hijackers in periodic oral statements during the three-month-old trial and in the more formal statement Tuesday.

“We chose Pakistan for our action due to the politics of the present regime which maintains close relations with the great Satan, i.e., America,” they said.

The rambling 17-page statement, alternating violent polemics against the United States and Israel with quotations from the Koran, came after prosecutor Mian Aftab Farrukh rested his case.

May Last Several Weeks

Defense attorneys said they will also call witnesses, including journalists who reported the hijacking. Officials said the trial may continue for several more weeks inside the maximum-security prison, where the defendants are housed behind an electrified fence charged with 11,000 volts.

“Our aim was to fly the plane toward some sensitive strategic center of the Zionist enemy and blow it up there with us inside,” the hijackers said in their statement. “We wanted to destroy a sensitive strategic center of Zionists situated in Palestine through the explosion of an American airplane. We wanted to strike at both enemies with one weapon at the same time.”

Plastic explosives were found on the hijackers after their arrest. But at the time of the hijacking, their only demands were for an airline crew to fly the plane to Cyprus, where they hoped to achieve the release of Palestinians charged with killing an Israeli couple and a third person on a yacht moored in Larnaca in September, 1985.

In their statement, the men said they had planned to release the plane’s 389 passengers and cabin crew after 1,500 “Palestinian Freedom Fighters” had also been released in various cities around the world.

Disguised as Police

But the hijackers, who gained access to the airport by disguising themselves as airport security police, never got away from the airport apron. After a 14-hour standoff during which Pakistan officials attempted to negotiate with the men over the cockpit radio, the plane’s cabin lights dimmed, apparently when the auxiliary power failed, causing the hijackers to panic.

They allegedly opened fire on the passengers and crew with automatic weapons and grenades. Pakistani troops then stormed the plane as the hostages fled. In the fighting and confusion, 21 people were killed or fatally wounded, and more than 100 others were injured. One passenger, a naturalized American, had been killed earlier and his body dumped on the tarmac. Pakistani officials have charged the alleged hijackers in 20 of the deaths.

The alleged mastermind of the hijacking, Salman Ali Turki, 32, was not at the scene of the hijacking himself. He was arrested a week later as he attempted to leave Pakistan using a Libyan passport. Prosecutors have charged that he traveled several times to Pakistan under Moroccan as well as Libyan passports to plot the crime before recruiting his younger colleagues, including a 17-year-old youth, from Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.

“We are the sons of Sabra and Chatilla,” the hijackers asserted in their statement Tuesday, referring to camps where Lebanese Christian militiamen, with the apparent knowledge of Israeli occupation forces, massacred hundreds of civilians in 1982. “We are the eyewitnesses of the bloody massacre and carnage.”

In interviews with The Times in October, two of the hijackers, Mansour Rashid, 21, and Fahd Jassim, 18, said that they were in Chatilla when the massacres occurred. Rashid said his mother and brother were killed in the attack.

Hijacker Khalil Kiwan, 21, said he was from the Ein el Hilwa refugee camp near Sidon, Lebanon. Mustafa Bomer, 21, who acted as commander of the group during the hijacking, said he came from a camp near Damascus, the Syrian capital.

‘Fagin-Like Character’

Turki, the only one of the group who speaks fluent English, also says he is Palestinian. However, U.S. officials say he is either Libyan or has strong Libyan connections.

Prosecutors portrayed Turki, a short swarthy man with close-cropped hair and a full beard, as a “Fagin-like” character, referring to the leader of a children’s pickpocket ring in the Charles Dickens novel “Oliver Twist.” They said he recruited the young, inexperienced Palestinians from the streets of the refugee camps before launching them on their mission with no risk to himself.