2nd Hostage Shot to Death; Hijackers Threaten Others : Demand Refueling of Jetliner

Arab gunmen today killed a second hostage, tossed his bloody body from a hijacked Kuwaiti jet and threatened to kill the rest of the nearly 50 captives if the plane is not refueled.

The hijackers said the dead man was a “Kuwaiti officer.” He was the second of three Kuwaiti military men aboard the Kuwait Airways jet that the hijackers have slain during the weeklong ordeal.

Doctors at Larnaca morgue said the side of the man’s face was badly injured, apparently from a beating. They said he had been shot twice in the head at close range before his body, hands bound behind his back, was thrown onto the tarmac at Larnaca Airport.

52 Still Aboard

There are 52 people aboard the Boeing 747, including three members of the Kuwaiti Royal Family and five or six hijackers, masked by blue hoods fashioned from airline pillowcases and armed with grenades and handguns.

The hijackers killed the man and pushed him out of the blue-and-white plane at 3:07 p.m. (5:07 a.m. PDT) after Cypriot officials ignored two deadlines to refuel the jet. An ambulance picked up the body 30 minutes later.

“We have executed a Kuwaiti officer,” a hijacker told the control tower. “We also reconfirm that the craft must be refueled immediately, immediately, before we take more dangerous steps.”

At dusk, the hijackers put one of the passengers, identified as Fadl Marzouk Oteibi, on the radio.

‘Please Listen’

Speaking in Arabic, he told the control tower: “The hijackers say that if you don’t give us fuel they will kill all the passengers. Please listen to this and greetings to my family.”

The hijackers said they wanted about nine hours’ worth of fuel so they could fly to an unspecified “neutral country.”

That was the first time since landing at Larnaca on Friday that they have given any inkling of where they want to fly if they get fuel. They did not name a country, but Kuwait’s Al Qabas newspaper reported that Algerian officials have become involved in the negotiations.

The hijackers have demanded that Kuwait release 17 pro-Iranian terrorists convicted in 1984 of bombing the U.S. and French embassies in December, 1983.

Demands May Be Easing

But sources close to the negotiations said that the hijackers today demanded freedom only for the three men among the 17 who have been sentenced to death.

On Saturday, the hijackers killed their first victim, a 24-year-old Kuwaiti border guard.

Today, they set the first deadline for refueling at 1 p.m. and warned that “we will kill a personality related to the unjust Kuwaiti regime,” a reference to the members of Kuwait’s ruling Royal Family aboard.

The first deadline passed without incident after the deputy director of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Nicosia and the head of Cyprus’ Civil Aviation Department negotiated briefly with the hijackers.

Deadline Brings Body

The hijackers then set a 2:30 p.m. deadline and said refueling must start or “you’ll receive the corpse.” Forty-seven minutes later, the body was thrown out.

On Sunday, a pro-Iranian Shia Muslim faction in Lebanon threatened to kill American and French hostages it holds if any attempt is made to storm the plane.

Also on Sunday, the hijackers threatened to take off and force the pilot to crash the jet into the emir’s palace in Kuwait City.

Kuwait Airways Flight 422 was hijacked April 5 with 112 people aboard as it flew from Bangkok, Thailand, to Kuwait. It was forced down in Mashhad, northeast Iran, where 57 people were freed.

The plane left Iran on Friday after refueling. Lebanon and Syria refused to let it touch down at their airports and it landed at Larnaca after the pilot frantically radioed that he was running out of fuel.