Hijackers Set Deadline, Threaten to Kill Again

The hijackers who commandeered an Indian Airlines jet threatened today to start killing more hostages if a deadline was not met to fulfill their demands.

As the drama involving more than 150 hostages entered a fourth day, talks between the hijackers and an emissary sent by the United Nations failed to get anywhere.

The hijackers are demanding the release of a religious leader who is jailed for allegedly fomenting violence in India’s only Muslim-majority state.

“The hijackers have threatened they will start killing the passengers if the Indian government does not take concrete steps 1/8to meet their demands 3/8 by 12:40 Afghan time 1/812:10 a.m. PST 3/8,” U.N. negotiator Erick de Mul told reporters at the airport in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar after speaking to the hijackers and the pilot of the Airbus A-300.

De Mul said the pilot had appealed to the world “to do something” or the hijackers would start killing the hostages after the deadline expired.

Minutes before the deadline, armed Taliban soldiers surrounded the plane, and an Indian diplomat was reportedly talking to hijackers as the deadline expired, an official said. The fate of the hostages remained unknown.

Meanwhile, India prepared to send a team to Afghanistan to negotiate with the hijackers, Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said today.

Singh said permission was being obtained from Pakistan and Afghanistan--both considered by India to be hostile nations--to overfly their territory.

Although the negotiating team’s departure would not occur before the deadline, a Taliban spokesman said officials hoped that the hijackers would wait for their arrival.

Earlier, the Indian government dispatched a diplomat to deal directly with the hijackers, as the country’s leaders hinted for the first time that they were considering a deal to end the crisis.

Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakel said Sunday that De Mul spoke twice with the five hijackers from the radio control tower in Kandahar but failed to secure the hostages’ release. Mutawakel said the hijackers refused to deal with De Mul when he told them he was not speaking on behalf of the Indian government. The Afghan official blamed Indian leaders for the lack of progress.

“The Indians are not doing enough,” Mutawakel said. “The condition of the hostages is deteriorating.”

U.N. officials in Pakistan said that De Mul would stay in Afghanistan for at least another day.

The aircraft, with its curtains drawn across its windows, was parked on the runway in Kandahar. About a dozen pickup trucks operated by Taliban militiamen were parked nearby, while a handful of armed guards kept watch.

The standoff began Friday when a group of five men boarded an Indian Airlines plane bound for New Delhi and took it on a bizarre odyssey across South Asia.

The moves by Indian leaders, facing growing public pressure to win freedom for the hostages, indicated that they might be reconsidering their government’s refusal to negotiate with the hijackers.

“It’s not a yes-and-no answer to which I can address myself,” Singh said after being asked whether his government would comply with the hijackers’ demand that it free an imprisoned Pakistani cleric and several fighters for the independence of Kashmir, the Himalayan region at the center of a long-running dispute between India and Pakistan. “We have taken note of the demands. I will exercise all options toward the aim of ensuring the well-being of passengers.”

Singh’s cryptic statements contrasted sharply with earlier refusals by India to negotiate with the hostage-takers. India’s efforts to secure the release of the hostages has been complicated by the fact that they do not have diplomatic relations with the Taliban, an extremist Islamic group that controls most of Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, said Sunday that he told the hijackers to surrender or leave the country--and that the hijackers had indicated that they planned to leave. Omar said that the Indian Airlines plane was having technical problems and that he had dispatched mechanics to make repairs.

“We want the hijackers to leave,” Omar said in an interview. “We don’t want to harm the passengers; that is why we have refrained from using force.”

The five hijackers took over the jet Christmas Eve and took it on a zigzag journey across South Asia. The religious leader whose freedom they have demanded, Maulana Masood Azhar, is jailed for allegedly triggering violence in India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, and is a leader of a group fighting to expel the Indian government from the state.

The group, known as the Harkat Moujahedeen, is one of several armed bands waging an insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir, demanding either independence or union with Pakistan. Formerly, when it was known as the Harkat Ansar, it was branded a terrorist organization by the U.S. government for its alleged role in the kidnapping of six Western tourists in 1995. One escaped, but the others are all either confirmed to have been killed or are presumed dead.

The hijackers have killed one passenger--an Indian man returning from his honeymoon whom they stabbed to death in front of his wife. The other hostages have remained cooped up in the plane while it hopscotched from Nepal and India and Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan.

In what they described as a “goodwill gesture,” the hijackers released an ailing hostage Sunday. The Indian citizen, a diabetic patient named Kartar Singh, was the first captive released since the hijackers freed 27 other passengers Friday in the Emirates.

Addressing a news conference earlier in the day, Foreign Minister Singh said New Delhi was seeking international help in securing the release of the passengers.

“I am in touch with the foreign ministers of many countries, and especially those where some passengers come from, and I am working toward a concerted and coordinated action,” he said.

A group of about 30 relatives of the hostages shouted down Singh at the news conference and called on the government to release Azhar. Some of the relatives broke down, while others yelled slogans.

“Why can’t this person be released?” demanded Sanjeev Chibber, a doctor who has six relatives on the plane. “Why cannot this cleric be freed for the sake of 160 people?”

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Shankhadeep Choudhury of The Times’ New Delhi Bureau, and Rahimullah Yusufzai, Times special correspondent in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.