Soviets Foil Hijacking; Attendant, 3 Passengers Die

A group described as “armed criminals” tried to hijack an Aeroflot jetliner, but police killed most of them in a shoot-out that also left a flight attendant and three passengers dead, the official news agency Tass said Wednesday.

Some of the hijackers were captured and arrested after the Tuesday incident, Tass said. They had demanded to be flown out of the Soviet Union to an unknown destination, the report said.

Tass said the Aeroflot TU-154, a three-engine, medium-range jetliner that seats up to 167 passengers, was on a 2,800-mile domestic flight from Irkutsk to Leningrad with a stopover in Kurgan, east of the Ural Mountains.

The report did not say where the hijacking attempt occurred, but there were indications that it was during the aircraft’s approach to Leningrad, the closest point to the border during the flight.

A civil aviation official at Leningrad’s Pulkovo Airport said he was told that the hijacking had terminated in the Leningrad region but refused to comment any further.

A spokesman at Irkutsk Airport on Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia said civil aviation channels reported that Flight 3739 “had made a forced landing” at an airport in the Leningrad region Tuesday night.

The spokesman, in a telephone interview, said the jet with an unknown number of passengers aboard took off without incident and that the stop in Kurgan appeared to go normally.

Tass said a stewardess and three passengers were killed in the shoot-out and that an unspecified number of passengers also were wounded.