Hijackers Demand India Free Prisoners

Hijackers who seized an Indian Airlines plane and flew it to Afghanistan threatened Saturday to blow up themselves and the estimated 160 passengers and crew aboard unless the Indian government frees an imprisoned Pakistani religious leader and several fighters for Kashmiri independence.

As India vowed to resist the hijackers’ demands and a United Nations official for Afghanistan prepared to launch negotiations, the terrifying saga that began Friday afternoon after the plane left Nepali airspace finally was revealed to be the work of Muslim militants seeking independence for Indian-ruled Kashmir.

In its fourth landing since the ordeal began, the plane touched down Saturday morning in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, where it was being guarded by troops of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban group that controls Afghanistan. The Afghan news agency said one male passenger was allowed to disembark for medical treatment but was returned afterward.

Taliban authorities already are under U.N. sanctions for hosting Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, considered by the United States to be a world terrorist mastermind, and they appeared to want to minimize their contact with the hijackers.

They asked the United Nations to take charge of negotiating the passengers’ release and said they had denied the hijackers’ request to be allowed to fly onward to the Afghan capital, Kabul. Any negotiation would have to be conducted through intermediaries because India has no diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said Saturday that his government would not bow to any hijacker demand.

The U.N. coordinator for Afghanistan, Erick de Mul, arrived early today in Kandahar from neighboring Pakistan to try to end the standoff, U.N. officials said. De Mul was heading a three-person delegation.

Meanwhile, 27 passengers, mainly women and children, who were released Saturday while the Airbus A-300 was on the ground in the United Arab Emirates, arrived in New Delhi, giving the first details of the heavily armed hijackers’ seizure of the plane shortly after its takeoff from Nepal.

According to their accounts, the passengers on board were warned to cover their eyes with their clothing and not to look at the hijackers. One man on his honeymoon who apparently glanced at their faces once too often paid the ultimate price: He was stabbed to death in front of his new wife.

“I was told by the passengers that there were five hijackers in total--all well-built, aged under 30 and wearing monkey masks to cover their faces,” said Indian Minister for Civil Aviation Sharad Yadav.

He said three of the hijackers spoke Hindi and two spoke Nepali. One of the Hindi speakers had a strong Kashmiri accent, he said.

Officials in India said the hijackers might be linked to separatist groups that have been waging a protracted revolt against the Indian government in the trouble-torn Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir, demanding either outright independence or union with Islamic Pakistan.

After talking to the hijackers by radio and in person, Taliban authorities said the hijackers’ main demand was for the freedom of cleric Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani crusader for Kashmiri independence who has been held in an Indian prison in Jammu and Kashmir since 1994. One of the hijackers, in talks with the Taliban, identified himself as Azhar’s brother.

The hijackers threatened to blow up the aircraft unless their demands were met, said Taliban spokesman Wakil Ahmad Mutawakel, who said that he had met with two of the hijackers and that one of them identified himself as Azhar’s youngest brother, Ibrahim.

“We do not want them to stay here,” he added.

Another Taliban official quoted the hijackers as saying they were ready for “any sacrifice” to achieve their goals.

According to news service accounts, a group of Azhar’s supporters, known as the Harkat Moujahedeen, already has tried several times to use kidnappings as a way to free him.

Azhar, who traveled to India in 1992, was arrested in 1994 by Indian security in Anantnag, a small town in insurgency-racked Jammu and Kashmir, security officials in India said. He reportedly is being held in a high-security jail in Kot Bhalwal, near Jammu, the state’s winter capital.

The airplane had 189 people on board when it was hijacked Friday, including a crew of 11. Authorities said the passengers consisted of 150 Indians, eight Nepalese, four Swiss, four Spaniards and two French, along with one each from Belgium, Japan, Italy, Austria, Canada and the United States. The U.S. passenger was tentatively identified as a schoolteacher. A few other passengers were not listed by nationality.

The only known victim of the hijackers, whose body was unloaded during the plane’s stopover in Dubai, was identified as Vipin Katiyal, the Indian who was on his honeymoon.

The released passengers said that one other man aboard the plane had been stabbed but that his wounds apparently were not life-threatening. One account said Katiyal and the second man were made to stand up and were stabbed after their hands had been tied behind their backs.

An Indian official who spoke to some of the freed passengers, Manoj Raghuvanshu, said the hijackers “took over when the plane had entered Indian territory, somewhere after crossing the north Indian city of Lucknow.”

“The first thing they did was to stop communication between the passengers, mainly by threatening and also by blindfolding them,” he said.

Yadav, the Indian aviation minister, discounted the hijackers’ earlier claims that they had shot dead four passengers. The hijackers earlier made the pilot pass on that information, Yadav said, but it was a “fake” report.

After being hijacked, the plane meandered from city to city in the Asian subcontinent and the Middle East. Before reaching Kandahar on Saturday, it had landed in Amritsar, India; Lahore, Pakistan; and at an air base in Dubai.

Times staff writer Daniszewski reported from Cairo and special correspondent Choudhury from New Delhi.