Police Raid Jet, Kill 4 Hijackers : Terror: Elite unit in Marseilles storms plane seized by Islamic extremist gunmen in Algeria. Twenty-five passengers, crew and commandos are hurt in rescue.

Elite French police commandos stormed a hijacked Air France jet at dusk Monday in Marseilles, killing four Muslim extremists who had shot to death three passengers and held 170 others hostage during a 54-hour siege that began across the Mediterranean in Algeria.

During the raid, 25 people were injured: 13 passengers, nine members of the special police unit, the pilot and two other crew members.

The success of the risky mission was hailed in France as an important victory for the government in its fight against Islamic terrorism. Muslim extremists opposed to French support for the Algerian regime have slain more than 70 foreigners, including 23 French citizens, over the past year in an escalating civil war in the former French colony.

“France will fight inexorably against terrorism, and we will never give in to blackmail, wherever it comes from,” said Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, who personally ordered the police assault on the plane from his office in Paris.

The dramatic raid also was sure to bolster the conservative prime minister, the leading contender for the seat being vacated by retiring President Francois Mitterrand in May.

To move the plane to French soil, Balladur had pressured the Algerian government on Christmas Day to meet a demand of the hijackers and allow the Airbus A-300, which had been seized by men posing as baggage handlers as it prepared to depart Algiers for Paris, to fly to France.

Balladur said he decided to storm the plane early Monday, hours before the raid began. “It was apparent that the only solution to safeguard human lives was an assault,” he said, praising “the exemplary courage and efficiency” of the police unit.

“To tell you the truth,” he later told French television, “I couldn’t have hoped that the operation would go as well as it did.”

None of the hostage injuries were life threatening, officials said. But several police officers were severely wounded; one lost his hand when a grenade designed to distract the hijackers went off as he held it.

One of the hostages, Boualem Matnani, said the hijackers spent most of the two days trying to convince the passengers of the nobility of their cause. In keeping with traditional practices, they even put scarves on the heads of the women in the plane. “They wanted to install an Islamic republic in Algeria,” said Matnani, commander of the Algerian merchant marine. “And this afternoon, for an entire hour, they repeated these Islamic slogans. It was a political discourse.”

Ferhat, a well-known Algerian singer who goes by his last name, said the hijackers were reading from the Koran just before the police raid. “I think it was to give them courage,” he said.

“There were moments of great fear, because we thought they had sticks of dynamite and that they wanted to blow up the plane,” he added. “Then everything happened so fast. We fell on the floor, put our hands on our heads and the next thing we knew we were leaving the airplane.”

The jet had arrived before dawn Monday at the Marseilles airport, about 25 miles north of that Mediterranean port city. The hijackers, members of the Armed Islamic Group, which has targeted foreigners for assassination in Algeria, then demanded that the plane be refueled and take off for Paris.

It was unclear exactly what the hijackers had in mind. They told government negotiators that they hoped to use Paris and its television outlets as a world stage to air their grievances against the Algerian government. But one French government source said they had asked for an amount of fuel well in excess of that needed to fly to Paris.

French negotiators said talks with the hijackers bogged down Monday as the plane sat on the airport tarmac. Two elderly passengers were released in the afternoon, and the hijackers gave a 5 p.m. deadline for their demands.

Shortly after that hour, in gathering darkness, one of the hijackers fired several shots from the cockpit window at the control tower. Minutes later, a 50-member team from the French police “intervention group” raced up three moving stairways to the plane and yanked open the doors.

As five police officers in black uniforms stormed the front of the plane, others opened two inflatable evacuation chutes elsewhere along the fuselage, and passengers began sliding to freedom. The five police officers exchanged rapid bursts of gunfire with the hijackers; three officers were wounded by hijackers firing through the internal cockpit door.

Police detonated “blinding grenades” at the cockpit door, creating explosions heard for blocks. The pilot of the plane climbed out a small cockpit window, fell 30 feet to the ground and limped away.

“The passengers behaved remarkably,” said Denis Favier, commander of the police unit. Most fell to the floor, escaping gunfire bursts from inside the cockpit. And police moved many to the back of the plane by pulling the corridor carpet on which they lay.

“We weren’t sure how well-armed the hostage-takers were, we weren’t sure where they were in the plane, and we weren’t sure how many there were,” Favier said. “And we knew they would be very determined.”

Seven minutes after the operation began, the French police had killed all four hijackers, who were armed with rifles and pistols.

Over the weekend, police thought as many as five hijackers might be on the plane, based on interviews with the 63 people, most of them women and children, who had been released shortly after the hijacking began Saturday morning.

When the raid began though, the police thought there were only three hijackers, basing that calculation on observations of the cockpit and listening devices they had surreptitiously installed in the plane.

Gen. Jean Riviere, deputy director of the national police, said the raid followed “a classic pattern.”

“Our goal is always to neutralize the hijackers while evacuating the hostages as quickly as possible,” he said. “But rescuing so many hostages in a confined space like an airplane is one of the most difficult operations.

“I’m just sorry that anyone was injured,” Riviere added. “But I think everybody’s happy there were no dead among the hostages or the police.”

The wounded hostages were taken to area hospitals. Others went by bus to the airport terminal, where they were met by psychologists. Many were still anxious, doctors said, and a few had to be sedated. Police said they intended to question many of the hostages before allowing them to continue their journey to Paris.

Most of the passengers on the plane were Algerian nationals, although as many as 40 were French citizens. An Algerian police officer and a Vietnamese man were killed Saturday when the hijackers took over the plane. A third man, a French civil servant who worked as a cook in the French Embassy in Algiers, was killed Sunday afternoon when a hijacker-imposed deadline for the aircraft’s departure from Algeria passed.

Of all Western countries, France has the strongest links with Algeria, which won its independence from France in 1962. Until the recent guerrilla attacks, 75,000 French nationals lived in Algeria. Almost 1 million Algerians, including first- and second-generation French citizens, live in France.

Although Algerians in France have watched with unease as the conservative government here has targeted them in a crackdown on fundamentalists, most supported the strong action against the terrorists Monday.

Even the Islamic Salvation Front, which also opposes the Algerian government, condemned the hijacking. In a statement from its office in Germany, it denounced “this hostage-taking, those who ordered it, its authors and their demands.”

The Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, which claimed responsibility for the hijacking, is considered the most dangerous of the guerrilla groups operating in Algeria because of its stated intention to drive foreigners out of the country and to force the government to resign.

Concerned about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and its vast economic interest in oil-producing Algeria, France has backed the Algerian government, although lately Paris has called for negotiations with the Islamic opposition.