Hijackers Ask Fuel to Fly Elsewhere for Massacre

The armed and hooded hijackers of a Kuwait Airways jumbo jet, speaking from the front door of the plane, told journalists Saturday that they are asking the Algerian government for fuel so they can take the airliner elsewhere to massacre the 31 hostages aboard.

“We are asking our Algerian brothers for fuel,” said a hijacker dressed in a blue sweat suit and a light blue hood, “so we can settle our account with Kuwait elsewhere. We don’t want to have the massacre in a friendly country.”

The harsh words from hijackers who already have killed two Kuwaiti hostages came in a dramatic encounter with three reporters who sat on the steps of a stairway alongside the Boeing 747 and asked questions of three hijackers who sat near the open front door.

The hijackers, believed to number eight Shia Muslim Lebanese, had requested the meeting, asking the scores of television and press reporters covering the 12-day-old hijacking to pick three journalists to represent them. Youssef M. Ibrahim, a 44-year-old Egyptian-born, Arabic-speaking correspondent of the New York Times, represented the English-speaking press.

One Conciliatory Note

There was one conciliatory note in the harshness of the 14-minute session conducted entirely in Arabic. Asked by Ibrahim if they would accept a solution in which they took the plane elsewhere and “withdrew from the operation,” a hijacker replied, “We will study in its entirety any solution that is presented to us by our Algerian brothers.”

While it was not quite clear, there seemed to be a hint in the question and the reply that the hijackers might eventually accept some kind of solution short of their demand for the release of 17 Shia Muslim prisoners from Kuwaiti jails. The Algerian government, in fact, assumed that such a solution had been already worked out in Cyprus when the plane arrived from Nicosia before dawn Wednesday. They expected the hijackers, who had released most of their passengers in stops in northeastern Iran and Cyprus, to release the rest soon after reaching Algiers in exchange for their own freedom.

But, if such an agreement had been worked out in Cyprus, it somehow came apart in Algiers, for the hijackers, while steadfastly promising not to kill anyone in Algiers, have continuously insisted that only the release of the 17 prisoners in Kuwait can save the lives of the remaining hostages.

The demand for fuel, amid talk of a massacre elsewhere, posed a dilemma for the Algerian government. Although the hijackers have kept their promise not to harm any hostages on Algerian soil--they did, in fact, release a diabetic passenger Thursday night--it would be difficult for the Algerian government to supply them with fuel so they can kill the hostages outside Algeria.

In a statement read before replying to questions, the hijackers tried to explain their grievance with Kuwait.

“Kuwait has no shame,” the hijackers said. “It puts Muslims on trial because they have attacked the spy nest of America and France in Kuwait.”

The hijackers said that the 17 Kuwaitis whose release they demand are “held under the worst conditions of imprisonment and torture in isolated cells.”

The 17 prisoners were convicted of bombing the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983, in which four people were killed and 66 were wounded, and Kuwait has refused to free them.

In the negotiations that have been conducted by Algerian intermediaries during the last few days, the hijackers said, “we have given total confidence to Algeria, but the Kuwaitis have not done the same.”

Ibrahim and another male journalist were searched thoroughly by a hijacker wearing a hood, blazer and sweat pants and loosely carrying a submachine gun. The third journalist, a woman, was not searched.

The hijacker in the sweat suit did all the talking at the news session but frequently conferred in a whisper with a third hijacker, whom the journalists could not see easily in the recesses beyond the door. It was obvious that the third hijacker was providing guidance for the replies to the questions.

Ibrahim said the hijacker who read the statement and replied to questions spoke in classical Arabic with an accent from the Levant--either of Lebanon, Syria or Palestine.

The journalist described the mood of the session, held in the glaring sun, as “tense but correct” and “very serious.” He said he could detect no nervousness on the part of the hijackers. The spokesman, Ibrahim added, betrayed no quiver in his voice, though “I cannot say he was relaxed.”

The meeting with the hijackers triggered a bitter controversy when Ibrahim denounced the British Broadcasting Corp. correspondents for providing him with a microphone that broadcast the words of the hijackers back to BBC reporters 400 yards away.

Ibrahim said the BBC had misled him into thinking that they had given him an ordinary tape recorder. He said that the hijackers might have become infuriated if they had discovered that his machine was broadcasting their words.

He described the BBC’s deception, which gave it a worldwide scoop on what the hijackers were saying, as “a childish and irresponsible thing to do.”

In Washington, officials said the United States suspects that one of the hijackers is a man already wanted here for his role in the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, during which U.S. Navy diver Robert D. Stethem was murdered.

The individual, Hassan Izzaldin, was indicted in November, 1985, on air piracy and murder charges in connection with the 16-day hijacking, which captured worldwide attention.

Another of the four men indicted in the case, Mohammed Ali Hamadi, was arrested last year and is jailed in West Germany.

The U.S. officials, confirming parts of a report in Saturday’s New York Times, said their identification of Izzaldin is based largely on physical descriptions of the hijackers from Kuwait Airways passengers who were released recently. The United States apparently has no photographs or other positive identification of the hijackers.

In Lebanon, a senior Shia Muslim militia official with links to the radical Hezbollah (Party of God) told Reuters news service that Izzaldin was not on the Kuwaiti jet but in suburban Beirut, where he lives. “Checks were made on his whereabouts, and we found that he was still in Beirut,” that official told the news service.

However, one U.S. official who declined to be identified said U.S. officials still believe there is “slightly better than a 50-50 chance” that Izzaldin is aboard the hijacked Boeing 747.

“Certainly, there’s a warrant on him (Izzaldin), and certainly the U.S. would like to get anybody from the TWA 847 hijacking back for trial,” the official said.

That official said the TWA hijackers and the captors of the Kuwaiti jet apparently are “from the same circle of folks” and that the circumstances surrounding the two hijackings are similar.

In both cases, the hijackers’ principal demand has been the release of the 17 Shia Muslims jailed in Kuwait.

The United States has placed the capture and trial of the TWA 847 hijackers among its top counterterrorism goals.

Stethem was reportedly beaten before being shot and dumped from the main door of the TWA jet.

Times staff writers Ronald J. Ostrow and Michael Wines in Washington contributed to this story.