Iranian Guards Kill 4 Hijackers in Shoot-Out

Four men armed with grenades and handguns tried to hijack an Iranian airliner during a domestic flight, but security guards killed them in a midair shoot-out, Iranian news reports said Friday.

Tehran Radio, in a dispatch monitored in Nicosia, said the gunmen tried to seize Flight 133 on Thursday night after it took off from the city of Shiraz in southwest Iran en route to the port city of Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz.

“By the alertness and swift action of flight security guards of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the four hijackers were killed and the plane landed safely with all the passengers unhurt,” the radio said.

A spokesman for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard told Tehran Radio that the hijackers took a flight attendant hostage before the guards moved in.

Spokesman Alireza Afshar, who said that the hijackers had demanded to go to Israel or Iraq, conceded that check-in procedures had been relaxed recently and that the hijackers apparently took advantage of this and were able to smuggle weapons aboard the plane.

A Revolutionary Guard statement quoted earlier by the radio described the hijackers of the Boeing 727 as “mercenaries of America,” a catch-all phrase for opposition groups fighting to overthrow the Islamic government.

The gunmen were not further identified. However, a reference in the statement that said the gunmen misused “responsibilities to search passengers” implied they may have been dissident members of the Revolutionary Guard employed in flight security.

The Revolutionary Guard, an elite paramilitary force, set up a special unit of sky marshals in 1984 after several Iranian passenger planes were hijacked and flown out of the country by dissident groups.

This special unit has since foiled 16 hijack attempts on Iran Air domestic flights, including Thursday’s, the news reports said.