Hijackers of Kuwaiti Jet Free 32 More Hostages

The hijackers holding a Kuwaiti jetliner at an airport in northeastern Iran released 32 more passengers early today but warned that the remaining hostages will be in “serious danger” if their demands are not met, the Iranian news agency IRNA reported.

The release of the 32 left about 50 passengers and crew members on the plane, according to IRNA.

The gunmen said Wednesday that they would order the plane to fly elsewhere if their demands were not met.

Earlier Wednesday, the terrorists, said to number five or six men, allowed an Iranian doctor on board to treat two ailing women who are believed to be members of Kuwait’s royal family.

Condition ‘Not Satisfactory’

The news agency quoted the doctor afterward as saying that the condition of one of the women “was not satisfactory.” There was no elaboration, but the agency said the hijackers had refused the doctor’s request to remove the woman from the plane for further medical treatment.

As the drama dragged into its second day, the hijackers, showing increasing impatience, radioed a second threatening message to the control tower at Mashhad airport, where the Kuwait Airways Boeing 747 was forced to land early Tuesday after being commandeered by the gunmen during a homeward-bound flight from Bangkok, Thailand.

“Time is running out, and you have not done anything for us yet,” Tehran Radio quoted one of the hijackers as saying. “The (hostages’) respite is nearing an end. . . . If we do not come to an agreement, we will depart for another destination.”

Food was delivered to the jumbo jet during the day, and Tehran Radio quoted airport authorities Wednesday evening as saying they had agreed to refuel the plane in order “to prevent any calamity or incident.”

The hijackers, wearing masks and armed with hand grenades and pistols, are demanding the release of 17 Shia Muslim militants imprisoned in Kuwait for various terrorist offenses, including bomb attacks against the U.S. and French embassies in 1983.

Earlier, they singled out three members of the Kuwaiti royal family who were on the flight and threatened to kill them if their demands were not met.

Officials in Kuwait identified the three as Fadhil Khaled al Sabah, a businessman and distant relative of Kuwait’s emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, and his two sisters, Ibtisaam and Anware, the latter incorrectly identified earlier as a brother. The sisters are believed to be the only women kept on board the plane when the hijackers released 24 other female passengers early Wednesday. An ailing Jordanian businessman was freed earlier.

The remaining hostages included about 30 Kuwaitis, 12 Britons, a number of other West Europeans and one man believed to hold dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship.

The Kuwaiti Cabinet, meeting in emergency session, sent a delegation of doctors and Foreign Ministry officials to Mashhad, 470 miles east of Tehran near the Soviet border, to negotiate with the hijackers.

Kuwait Rejects Demand

However, a government spokesman, declaring that Kuwait “will not give in to blackmail,” said the tiny sheikdom will “under no circumstances” agree to release the 17 convicted terrorists.

In London, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher applauded the Kuwaiti stand, saying, “We do not give in to blackmail because it only leads to further tragedies.” A Foreign Office spokeswoman added that Britain, with the lives of 12 of its own citizens at stake, stood “shoulder to shoulder” with Kuwait’s refusal to release the Shia prisoners.

In Washington, the State Department expressed similar support for Kuwait. “Kuwait has taken an exemplary position in the struggle against international terrorism, and we applaud them for it,” spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley said.

A senior Iranian military spokesman, Kamal Kharrazi, told a news conference in Tehran that the identity of the masked hijackers “is still not known to us,” adding, “All we know is that they speak Arabic and want the prisoners in Kuwait to be freed.”

While the hijackers sought to conceal their identity, the nature of their demands and several remarks overheard by passengers who were later freed suggested that they are Shia Muslims affiliated with one of the several terrorist groups that over the years have sought to gain the release of the Shias jailed in Kuwait.

The 17 prisoners are believed to be members of Al Daawa, an underground Iraqi revolutionary group allied with Iran.

2 Killed in 1984 Hijacking

In 1984, Shia terrorists hijacked another Kuwaiti plane to Iran, where they killed two American passengers before being taken into custody by Iranian security forces. The Iranians said at the time that they stormed the plane and overpowered the hijackers. But there were subsequent suggestions that the hijackers had already agreed to give themselves up.

That hijacking lasted six days, and diplomatic sources in the gulf expressed concern that the longer this one drags on, the more difficult it could be to resolve it peacefully.

Parliamentary elections are to be held in Iran later this month, and a bitter power struggle is said to shaping up between the two major factions fielding candidates.

One faction, led by Parliament Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani, is trying to consolidate control and build a mandate for economic reforms and limited contacts with the West, diplomats say. Opposed to these “pragmatists” is a coalition of die-hard revolutionaries and conservative clerics whose power base depends on continuing the seven-year-old Persian Gulf War with Iraq and the Iranian revolution’s ideological confrontation with the West in general.

Given Kuwait’s support for Sunni Muslim-ruled Iraq in the war with Shia Iran, which is a non-Arab nation, the hijacking has both political and religious overtones. Thus, there is a risk that the hostages’ fate could become entangled in the murky machinations of the two competing Iranian factions if their ordeal is not ended soon, analysts said.

Indeed, Iraq charged Wednesday that the hijackers are Iranian agents and that the whole affair is a “stage-managed act . . . arranged by the Iranian authorities for purposes that serve Iran’s aggressive schemes.”