Hijackers Free Hostages on Black Sea Ferry

The hijackers of a Black Sea ferry tossed their weapons overboard, freed 242 hostages and surrendered to Turkish security forces Friday, peacefully ending a three-day ordeal that had threatened to embroil Turkey in a separatist conflict in Russia.

“It’s over? Thank God!” Turkish Adm. Taner Uzunay said over the radio after the Turkish captain of the ferry Avraziya told him that the seven pro-Chechen hijackers had left the ferry under arrest on a naval launch.

The hostages, including 114 Russians, appeared unharmed.

Despite Moscow’s urging to use force, Turkey met the crisis with negotiations but no concessions.

Shotgun-toting hijackers with grenades on their coats and knives in their belts had threatened to blow up the ferry unless the Russian army ended a siege of Chechen hostage-takers in the southern Russian village of Pervomayskaya.

That demand was overtaken by events when the village fell to Russian forces Thursday.

Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller stood firm against the hijackers’ demand that they be allowed to sail to Istanbul and hold a news conference. Chechen separatist leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev also urged them to end their action without bloodshed.

“I told them this is not our business, especially not in Turkey,” said Shemsettin Yusuf, a Dudayev emissary. “It is not the way to help Chechnya. The people of Turkey are supporting us, so it’s a shame to spoil it.”

“There was no bargaining,” Ciller said. “We told them there was no way they could get away with this kind of thing.”

While vowing to prosecute the hijackers, the Turkish leader said long-term stability in the Black Sea region depends on Russia’s willingness to end its 13-month-old ethnic war against breakaway Chechnya. The conflict cost more than 20,000 lives last year and flared anew this month in the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan.

But Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, summing up 10 days of conflict with the Chechens in Dagestan, vowed Friday to press his military campaign into the separatist “dens” of Chechnya’s mountains.

“Those dens which have been spotted by the intelligence service--and there are mountains of weapons and ammunition there, as Pervomayskaya demonstrated--constitute a threat, a great threat,” Yeltsin told a news conference in Moscow. “These strongholds will now begin to be wiped out.”

The Russian leader defended the massive artillery assault on rebel-held Pervomayskaya, saying, “Mad dogs must be shot.”

He said 27 Russian soldiers and 128 separatist fighters were killed in the operation and 96 of the 120 hostages were freed. The other hostages were unaccounted for, he said.

In an interview with U.S. News & World Report, Dudayev said Salman Raduyev, a relative and the leader of the hostage-takers in Dagestan, had returned to Chechnya and would be “brought to trial under full martial law” for the raid.

Violence in Dagestan began Jan. 9 when the Chechens herded more than 2,000 hostages into a hospital in the town of Kizlyar. It spread to nearby Pervomayskaya when the Chechens, first offered safe passage to Chechnya, were halted in the border village by Russian troops and took more hostages.

Yeltsin gave no account of civilian casualties in Pervomayskaya, a village of 900 that was all but destroyed by Russian artillery.

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Most of the hijackers of the Avraziya ferry are veterans of the Chechen conflict. They include two Chechens with Russian passports and five Turkish citizens with blood ties to the Caucasus Mountains region, a volatile isthmus between the Black and Caspian seas inhabited by Chechens and dozens of other ethnic groups with warrior traditions.

They seized the 3,800-ton ferry in a hail of fire from pump-action shotguns in the Turkish port of Trabzon on Tuesday night, slightly wounding a Turkish port official, the only casualty of the operation.

The hostages, mostly Russian “shuttle traders” who fill suitcases in Turkey and sell at home, said they were treated well.

While making it clear they had nothing against Turkey, the hijackers then rigged the ferry with explosives and ordered the captain on a 550-mile westward journey toward Istanbul, while they telephoned the Turkish media to broadcast pro-Chechen diatribes.

Television reports in Turkey said hijack leader Muhammad Tokcan, an ethnic Abkhaz with Turkish citizenship, is a close friend of Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. They also reported that Tokcan’s Chechen fiancee had been killed in a Russian attack in Chechnya.

Yeltsin said Turkish authorities arrested Tokcan’s family during the hijacking to put pressure on the hijackers to surrender. He also said Russia shadowed the ferry with a destroyer and offered Turkey help in ending the hijacking forcefully.

Many Turks feel sympathy for their fellow Muslims in Chechnya.

As many as 8 million of Turkey’s 65 million people are descended from people who fled czarist and Soviet Russian conquests of the Caucasus region in the last century. Scores of Turks turned out to cheer the hijackers as the big white ferry turned in circles at the mouth of the Bosporus.

Five thousand Islamic fundamentalists, encouraged by the hijackers’ adoption of pro-Islamic slogans and symbols, marched to the Bosporus burning Russian flags and shouting, “Chechnya will be the Russians’ grave!”

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Moscow contributed to this report.