Odyssey of Hijacked Indian Jet in 2nd Day

An Indian Airlines jet with more than 160 people aboard landed in southern Afghanistan this morning after being hijacked by a shadowy group of hijackers Friday and embarking on a terrifying odyssey across the Asian subcontinent and the Middle East.

In Kandahar, Afghanistan, however, the hijackers’ intentions remained unclear.

“The Indian authorities have been in touch with our embassy and said please allow the plane to land in Kandahar. The pilot is very tired, they told us,” a spokesman for the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic group that controls Afghanistan, told Associated Press.

Earlier, before dawn, the hijackers had released 25 passengers in the United Arab Emirates, a government official there said, but they then took off again. At least one person was reported dead in the ordeal.

Emirates Information Minister Abdullah bin Zayed said the hijackers had been given food and 5,000 to 6,000 gallons of jet fuel before they took off.

Aboard the Airbus A-300 aircraft, according to various reports, were five hijackers armed with machine guns and grenades. Early in the ordeal, they told the pilot that they had executed four passengers and wounded five more, but officials said the pilot had neither heard gunshots nor been allowed to leave the cockpit to verify the fate of the passengers.

Indian government officials quoted by CNN after the plane set off from the Emirates at 4:40 a.m. today said they could confirm that at least one person had died aboard the jet.

Television footage of the released passengers showed children and women sobbing in relief and at least one shirtless man lying prone. He apparently had been killed by the hijackers.

There was no immediate word about the identity of the hijackers, but news reports in India indicated that they were speaking Hindi. Speculation focused on the possibility that they were either Sikh or Kashmiri militants. Some hijackings in India in the past have been carried out by Kashmiri or Sikh separatists. The disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir is split between India and Pakistan, rival nuclear nations.

After a nine-hour wandering journey, the plane landed at Al Minhad military air base near the Emirates city of Dubai shortly after midnight local time. Once on the ground, the hijackers asked for the food and fuel and offered to release the 57 women and children on board, officials said.

The plane, with 189 people aboard, had originally taken off from Katmandu in Nepal bound for New Delhi but was hijacked as soon as it entered Indian airspace 175 miles away. During its subsequent meanderings, it landed briefly in India and then in Pakistan, tried unsuccessfully to land in Afghanistan, then changed course and headed for the Persian Gulf.

Refused permission to land in Oman’s capital, Muscat, it finally touched down at the military air base 18 miles from Dubai, a glitzy Persian Gulf emirate that in recent years has transformed itself into a shopping and tourist destination for three continents.

The aircraft was on the ground for about four hours in Dubai. Zayed, the information minister, said those released were women and children and “injured people.” He said he had no details about their injuries.

Earlier, Emirates military spokesman Brig. Atiq Juma confirmed that negotiations were underway, apparently through the pilot.

“Our main concern is the passengers’ safety,” he said.

The plane was on a regularly scheduled flight from Nepal to New Delhi when it was diverted by the hijackers to Lahore, Pakistan, but it was denied permission by the government to land there. The hijackers then forced the aircraft to land in Amritsar, in western India, where it remained on the ground for 40 minutes.

Then, the plane returned to Lahore, where it made an emergency landing without permission from the airport, Pakistan’s government-run news agency reported. The government gave the hijackers food and allowed the aircraft to refuel and take off after Pakistani authorities negotiated with the captors.

The plane apparently came close to crashing when it forced its way onto the Lahore runway, Pakistani authorities said.

Pakistan had refused the aircraft permission to land until it was only 500 feet off the ground, airport manager Ghulam Mustafa Mirani said. The runway lights had been switched off in an attempt to prevent it from landing, he told the French news agency Agence France-Presse.

Finally, “the airport authorities realized it was so dangerous and that it could lead to a crash, and so they allowed it to land,” he said.

According to Indian Airlines, the 189 people on board consisted of 178 passengers and 11 crew members. They were listed as 150 Indians, eight Nepalese, one Canadian, one American, four Swiss, four Spanish, one Belgian, one Japanese, one Austrian, two French and one Italian. The identity of four passengers was not known.