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3 Hijack Russian Jet to Norway, Surrender

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<i> From Times Staff and Wire Reports</i>

Three men believed to be Iranians and armed with two hand grenades and a homemade explosive hijacked a Russian Aeroflot passenger jet Wednesday with 52 aboard on a flight from Azerbaijan and forced it to fly to Norway, where they requested political asylum, then surrendered early today.

“The three hijackers have surrendered,” with the understanding that their request for asylum would be considered in the normal way, a government spokeswoman said, and all remaining passengers and crew were released unharmed.

Norway’s national news agency, NTB, reported that the three men walked down the steps of the plane with their hands in the air.

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Two specially trained Norwegian police officers working with English and Russian translators had been negotiating for the release of the hostages since shortly after the plane landed at a small airport in Gardermoen, about 20 miles north of Oslo, around 8 p.m. local time (11 a.m. PDT).

The twin-engine Tupolev 134 was parked in the military section of the airport, which serves both charter and military aircraft. Negotiators in the control tower, about 600 yards away, communicated with the hijackers by radio.

Late Wednesday, the hijackers released all 10 women and seven children aboard so they could eat and rest, local authorities said.

Shortly after the jet landed, one man got out and walked around, but he got back on the plane after about five minutes.

“He was asked to check that he was in Norway,” said Nina Vedholm, spokeswoman for the Norwegian Ministry of Justice.

The plane, carrying 46 passengers and six crew members, took off from Baku, the capital of war-torn Azerbaijan. It was en route to Perm in southern Russia when the three hijackers brandished their weapons and demanded to be flown to Kiev, Ukraine, authorities said.

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There the jet refueled, and the hijackers announced they wanted to fly to Norway, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry said. But the plane’s crew had never flown abroad, and the air pirates agreed to take aboard an English-speaking pilot with international flight experience, the ministry’s Col. Ivan S. Bobrik said.

“The hijackers also agreed to release women and children, but none of them wanted to leave the plane,” Bobrik said. “Probably the women all had fathers or brothers, sons, friends and relatives on board whom they didn’t want to part with in a moment of crisis.”

Bobrik said Ukrainian officials decided that any attempt to disarm the hijackers would endanger the passengers, and they permitted the jet to take off for the three-hour flight to Norway.

Vedholm said the men were of Iranian origin but apparently lived in Azerbaijan and did not have Iranian citizenship.

Azerbaijan’s population of 7 million includes a small Iranian minority. More than 20 million ethnic Azerbaijanis live in northern Iran.

Moscow press reports, confirmed by an unidentified man answering the telephone at the Azerbaijani Ministry of Security in Baku, described the hijackers as suspected members of the Iranian-backed radical Islamic group Hezbollah.

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Norway was the site of recent clandestine peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which produced an accord signed in Washington on Monday. That peace pact has been denounced by Islamic radicals.

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