Kabul Regime Regains Control; Coup Leader Said to Join Guerrillas : Afghanistan: Hundreds are killed in uprising. Heavy fighting is reported continuing at key air base.

Afghanistan’s renegade defense minister, Gen. Shahnawaz Tanai, leader of a failed attempt to overthrow President Najibullah’s Soviet-backed regime, flew to neighboring Pakistan on Wednesday with his family and 11 others after two days of intensive fighting left hundreds dead and the regime’s armed forces in disarray.

Pakistani authorities confirmed that the veteran army commander landed with his wife, two sons and two daughters in a military helicopter near the border city of Peshawar.

But while some reports said Pakistani authorities took Tanai into custody, Pakistan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tanveer Ahmed said the coup leader simply dropped his family off, conferred with some leaders of the Islamic moujahedeen rebels waging a decade-old war against Afghanistan’s Communist regime--and then recrossed the border.

There were reports from rebel and Pakistani sources that Tanai was joining the rebel forces and continuing the struggle against Najibullah.

In a broadcast on state-run Kabul Radio late Wednesday, Najibullah asserted that Tanai had fled.

“According to exact information, Tanai fled to Pakistan carrying a lot of U.S. dollars with him,” said the president, demanding that Pakistan return Tanai and “his criminal friends” as well as the aircraft and the money.

At least two Afghan aircraft, a helicopter and an Antonov 12 military transport, landed in Pakistan on Wednesday with defectors, including some senior military officials, Pakistani officials and witnesses said.

Tanai’s trip to Pakistan, a strident supporter of the moujahedeen forces, capped the second day of intense fighting in the Afghan capital of Kabul and at the regime’s largest and most strategic air base as pro-regime forces used heavy artillery to drive Tanai and his military supporters from their final strongholds.

Shortly before Tanai’s escape from the Kabul area, Najibullah declared for the second time in 24 hours that he had crushed the coup attempt by hundreds of rebellious military officers and soldiers. Independent analysts and diplomats in Kabul confirmed that the 43-year-old president had regained control for now.

“Many people have been killed and wounded in the fighting,” a solemn Najibullah said in the earlier broadcast Wednesday, several hours after he was forced to order the bombing of the strategic Bagram Air Base, 30 miles north of the capital, to reclaim it.

The president conceded that heavy fighting had taken place between rival military factions earlier Wednesday at the base, which apparently was used by mutinous air force pilots supporting the coup attempt. But, he added, “the situation is rapidly returning to normal.”

Soon after Najibullah’s announcement, reliable diplomatic and other sources in the capital began reporting by telex, which had been cut for the previous 24 hours. They said the city was largely quiet and that Tanai’s attempted coup appeared to be all but over.

“Right now, the government of the republic of Afghanistan is very much in control,” Abdul Baqi Samandari, deputy foreign minister, told the only two Western journalists now in Kabul.

Samandari said a number of air force and other military detachments had taken part in the coup attempt. He linked the timing of the coup to a criminal trial that began in Kabul on Monday of 124 military and civilian supporters of an abortive coup last December. The government now also blames that earlier coup attempt on Tanai.

“A number of traitors have been killed, captured or surrendered,” Samandari said, after pro-regime artillery units retook the two key rebel strongholds at the Defense Ministry and at the air base.

Ahmad Sarwar, the Afghan ambassador in New Delhi and brother-in-law of Najibullah, told reporters here that hundreds of rebel officers and men had been arrested, among them eight of the military’s estimated 1,000 generals.

The ambassador said several government buildings were destroyed during bombing runs on the capital by rebel pilots and that most of the dead were civilians. He said he had no precise death count.

Eyewitnesses reached in the capital Wednesday night put the death toll in the hundreds. But they, too, confirmed the government’s claim that it controls Kabul. There were only sporadic and distant sounds of artillery, machine-gun and anti-aircraft fire late Wednesday, they said. Since the coup attempt began with a startling bombing run on Najib’s sprawling presidential palace just after noon Tuesday, Kabul has remained virtually sealed off from the outside world. The international airport remains closed. A 24-hour curfew is still in effect.

Najibullah’s broadcast claim of control came after a day of sharply conflicting reports from Afghan officials, Western diplomats monitoring the coup from neighboring Pakistan and leaders of the moujahedeen, the Islamic guerrilla force that the president contends was in league with Tanai’s rebel forces.

Citing unconfirmed reports and speaking only on the condition of anonymity, Western diplomats in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad reported that Tanai’s forces had continued to pound away at Kabul in the morning, with bombing raids and in hand-to-hand street fighting.

Spokesmen for moujahedeen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the most fundamentalist and anti-American member of the fractious, seven-party, U.S.-backed guerrilla movement, asserted that Tanai’s forces actually controlled Bagram, which is the regime’s largest and most strategically located air base.

Western diplomats as late as Wednesday night insisted there was evidence that Tanai’s forces still held Bagram.

Najibullah and his deputy foreign minister confirmed that there had been heavy fighting at the air base, but both insisted that the rebel forces had been driven out.

Independent reports from Pakistan and Afghanistan indicated that the rebel forces loyal to Tanai do have significant support within the Afghan air force.

“There are deep divisions in the air force,” said an Afghan expert in New Delhi. “And if the air force is in trouble, Najibullah is in trouble.”

In the 12 months since the Communist regime’s Soviet backers withdrew 110,000 occupation troops from Afghanistan, it has been largely the Afghan air force that has helped Najibullah defy Western intelligence predictions that his government would crumble within weeks or months.

High-altitude bombing runs on moujahedeen positions, combined with daring, high-speed helicopter sorties at tree-top level, thwarted a series of offensives by the Islamic guerrilla force.

Still, several air force pilots have told Western journalists in the last year that they are required to fly grueling schedules, and several have defected to the rebel side.

Analysts also were trying Wednesday to assess Kabul’s assertion that Tanai and his mutinous forces were in league with Hekmatyar and his moujahedeen rebels.

On the surface, the charge appeared unlikely. Tanai is a key member of the Khalq faction of the ruling People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The Khalqis are hard-line socialists opposed to the “national reconciliation” policy of Najibullah. His Parcham faction has pursued a policy of negotiations with the tribal groups that support the Islamic rebels and has virtually abandoned the party’s socialist principles.