No Further Violence, Hijackers Say

Two Algerian officials met with the hijackers of a Kuwait Airways jet with 32 hostages aboard today and said the air pirates agreed to avoid further violence in the nine-day terror odyssey.

Algerian Interior Minister Hadi Khediri said the hijackers repeated their demand for the release of 17 Shia Muslim men jailed in Kuwait for the 1983 bombing of the U.S. and French embassies.

“They told me they would try in Algiers to be very calm and use no violence,” Khediri said after meeting with the hijackers, who killed two hostages while the plane was in Cyprus earlier in the hijacking ordeal.

Khediri then met with the Kuwaiti minister of state for foreign affairs, Saud Ossami, who flew in today as head of an eight-man Kuwaiti delegation.

3rd Stop for Jet

“I am confident for a happy ending in Algiers,” Ossami said after the briefing.

(AP reported that unnamed Algerian officials said Kuwaiti “intransigence” has created a deadlock on the plane.)

A second Algerian Interior Ministry official who could be not further identified boarded the plane about 4 p.m. for 25 minutes. No further details of that talk were immediately available.

Algeria is the third stop for the jumbo jet, which was hijacked and forced to land in Iran on April 5 before being taken to Cyprus last Friday. Forty people, including eight hijackers, remained aboard the jet today.

The count was provided by Khediri, who said he saw 32 hostages and saw five or six of the hijackers today, and by PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, who said Tuesday that there were eight hijackers on the plane.

Half an Hour on Plane

Khediri was driven from a VIP lounge serving as a command post to the Boeing 747 standing on the tarmac at Houari Boumedienne International Airport in front of the rugged Djura Mountains. He stepped inside the blue-and-white airplane five hours after the aircraft arrived from Cyprus, where the hijackers traded 12 hostages for fuel.

Khediri spent slightly more than half an hour in the plane. When he left, the boarding steps were moved away and the doors closed.

“They told me they would not employ violence. I think they knew what they were saying,” Khediri said. He described the mood of the hijackers as “determined.”