Hijacking of Russian Jet Ends Safely in Sweden : Crime: Azerbaijani leaves grenades on aircraft steps before halting attempt to take his wife and baby to the United States. No one is injured.

A grenade-wielding Azerbaijani desperate to take his wife and baby to the United States hijacked a Russian passenger jet Saturday but got only as far as Sweden, where he surrendered.

The hijacker, described as bearded and 30ish, injured no one. He laid down his grenades on the airplane’s steps at the Stockholm airport Saturday night after several hours of negotiations, and was whisked away in a police bus.

Earlier, he had threatened to blow up the twin-engine Tupolev 134 and its dozens of passengers if not granted passage to New York. “We will land in New York together, or we will die together,” the hijacker said in a handwritten message he passed to officials at the Tallinn airport in Estonia, the Baltic News Service reported.

Although passengers said he appeared nervous and determined, the hijacker had shown from the start that he was not out for blood. When the airliner stopped in Estonia for refueling, he let about three dozen passengers go, and released a dozen more upon landing in Sweden, leaving about 35 on board.

Among those the hijacker released in Tallinn were three Americans, identified as Alvin Snapper, 63, and Kathleen Snapper, 53, of Las Vegas and Stanley Olchovik of Fayetteville, N.C. Olchovik told the Associated Press that he had tried to pacify the hijacker by giving him his business card and promising help in America and that the man had pocketed the card and said, “I’ll probably die anyway, but thank you.”

The hijacking was the third in 10 days. On Thursday, a Haitian gunman hijacked a missionary plane bound for West Palm Beach, Fla., and forced it to land at Miami International Airport. An Ethiopian man seeking asylum in the United States commandeered a Cairo-bound Lufthansa flight on Feb. 11. Both hijackings ended safely.

The latest ordeal began early Saturday morning, three hours into a flight from the Siberian oil industry center of Tyumen to St. Petersburg.

The hijacker sent the plane’s captain a note along with a convincing prop--the pin to a grenade. He demanded that the flight be diverted to the United States. But the crew told him the plane could not make it that far, so he agreed to a refueling stop in Tallinn.

There, authorities including the Estonian defense minister tried to persuade the hijacker to give himself up, but to no avail.

Illar Vaks, deputy head of the Estonian airline company, said in a telephone interview that when he and a group of other officials entered the plane for talks, they saw a bearded man “standing in the aisle holding two grenades in his hands.

“He looked not more than 30, trying hard to keep his composure but not exactly succeeding at it,” Vaks said. “The woman, probably his wife, stood behind him with a little child in her arms. . . . They stood like that, back to back, all the time we were inside.”

When the delegation persuaded the hijacker to let some people go, Vaks said, the man simply picked out one passenger after another, pointing at them to tell them they were free. During the talks, seven passengers also escaped out a back hatchway, Estonian government official Ulo Kaevats said.

Estonian officials said they decided not to storm the plane after the released passengers convinced them that the grenades looked genuine and the hijacker appeared desperate enough to explode them.

The man had asked to fly on to Helsinki, but Finnish authorities refused to accept the plane, so the destination was switched to Stockholm. Met by an escort of two Swedish fighter planes, the Tupolev landed in late afternoon.

In Stockholm, the hijacker let a dozen more passengers go but then appeared to balk in his negotiations with Swedish authorities. In the wake of his ultimate surrender, Sweden is likely to hand him back to Russia, as it has past hijackers.

Olchovik told the Associated Press that the hijacker smoked nervously and paced the aisle with the grenades in his hands. The wife, he said, told him that her husband had been unemployed in Azerbaijan. Swedish police said the couple’s baby boy seemed to have an eye disease, the Associated Press reported.

Saturday’s hijacking would have been a fairly common event in the old Soviet Union of two or three years ago, when young people, frustrated by the country’s strict laws limiting travel and emigration, began seizing Aeroflot planes at an alarming rate.

In 1990 and early 1991, the Soviet Union experienced a rash of hijackings, including one in which a man tried to convince a plane’s crew that a bar of soap was a bomb.

But hijackings had abated in the last year or two, perhaps influenced by eased travel regulations.

In Russia’s most recent publicized hijacking, a 31-year-old man tried to divert a plane from the Caucasus Mountains city of Grozny to Turkey last summer by threatening to blow up the craft with a grenade. After the plane landed in Moscow instead, the hijacker was shot to death by the riot police who surrounded it.