Afghan Jet Ordeal Turns Into Refugee Crisis for Britain

A four-day hijacking ordeal involving an Afghan jetliner turned into a refugee crisis for the British government Thursday as 74 people from the commandeered aircraft asked for political asylum and 21 others were placed under arrest.

Police worked throughout the day to cull hijackers from hostages and to establish whether the takeover was an elaborate bid to seek political asylum in this country.

If that scenario proves true, the peaceful conclusion to the hijacking drama at an airport northeast of London could be a double-edged sword for the government, which fears that other would-be immigrants might view Britain as a soft touch and make similar attempts.

Eager to signal that Britain would not reward hijackers with residency, Home Secretary Jack Straw said he will review each of the asylum applications himself, adding that he hopes most people from the plane will leave the country as soon as possible.

“I am determined that nobody should consider that there can be any benefit to be obtained by hijacking,” Straw told Parliament.

“The surrender from the plane was unconditional,” he added.

Gunmen Made No Political Demands

The motives and modus operandi of the hijackers remained a mystery. Police said the gunmen who seized the Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 after takeoff from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, on Sunday made no political demands and only referred to their country’s radical Islamic Taliban regime at the end of the ordeal.

“It only became clear in the last hour that the people on board were expressing concern about the political situation in Afghanistan,” said David Stevens, chief constable of the Essex police. “For the first 75 hours [of negotiations], they didn’t talk about the political situation at all.”

Britain’s longest hijacking crisis came to an end before dawn Thursday when about 85 captives, including women and children, began streaming down the rear stairs of the aircraft with their arms in the air as police marksmen trained their guns on them. The rest of those on board emerged two hours later.

Essex police spokesman John Broughton, an assistant chief constable, said a total of 162 people left the aircraft.

During the siege, police had said they thought there were six to 10 gunmen on board, but 19 people were arrested initially and two more later Thursday. Four handguns, five knives, two detonators, a set of brass knuckles and two grenades, apparently without fuses, were recovered from the plane.

Passengers apparently were not subjected to electronic or body searches before boarding the flight. The Taliban government has since announced that armed guards will now be stationed on all flights of state-owned Ariana.

The Taliban thanked British authorities Thursday for negotiating a peaceful end to the hijacking and urged them to return the aircraft--one of only nine planes in Ariana’s aging fleet--along with the passengers.

The European representative of the regime said innocent passengers on the plane could return home without fear of persecution, even if they had requested asylum.

But Gen. Rahmatullah Safi, who had been at Stansted Airport throughout the crisis, said the hijackers would face Islamic justice and probably the death sentence if they were sent back to Afghanistan.

“The hijackers, the terrorists, these people should be punished,” Safi told BBC radio. If they are sent home, he said, “punishment will be according to the [Islamic] law of Sharia, which is death.”

Britain does not have diplomatic relations with the hard-line Taliban regime, which practices a strict brand of Islam and controls most of Afghanistan.

Taliban officials initially reported that the hijackers were seeking the release of an opposition political leader but subsequently suggested that the hijacking was a plot to seek asylum in the West. They have said that 35 to 40 passengers on the plane were members of the same clan posing as a wedding party and that they may be related to some of the hijackers.

As part of their investigation, police were examining the amount of luggage that passengers had taken with them on what was to have been an hourlong domestic flight to the city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

r Straw suggested that anyone who had been on the flight with the intention of getting asylum would be considered part of the hijacking plot.

Human rights activists joined in condemning the hijacking but warned Britain to carefully weigh the asylum applications of all those on the plane--hijackers, possible family members and other passengers caught in the drama.

“The truth is, this is a desperate act by desperate men, desperate to get their families to safety,” said Nick Hardwick, chief executive of the Refugee Council. “It doesn’t excuse it at all, but it doesn’t mean we can return people to a very dangerous situation without very careful thought.”

But opposition politicians charged that the hijackers had headed for Britain because the country is too lenient toward refugees.

“Why the United Kingdom? How many European Convention on Human Rights signatories did that plane fly over on its journey from Moscow to the U.K.?” asked Ann Widdecombe, a Conservative member of Parliament.

Straw responded that Britain is examining whether Russia had met its international obligations by allowing the plane to take off again after it landed there en route to Britain. He asked why authorities in Moscow didn’t disable the plane, “which is standard practice.”

Britain received 3,975 applications for asylum from Afghan citizens last year, out of a total of 71,160 from around the world, according to the Home Office.

Temporary Housing for Asylum Seekers

Meanwhile, dozens of the exhausted Ariana passengers slept in beds for the first time in five nights, housed at a four-star Hilton hotel near the airport while officials arranged for a Cambodian charter plane to collect those willing to return to Afghanistan.

Passengers seeking asylum will be given temporary housing and government aid while their cases are considered.

Previous hijackers have been allowed to remain in Britain under both Conservative and Labor governments. In 1982, three Tanzanian hijackers who diverted a plane to London were granted asylum after serving short jail terms. One is now a lawyer specializing in asylum cases.

Six Iraqis who hijacked a Sudanese plane in 1996 also requested asylum after short jail terms. Their cases are still being considered.

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Janet Stobart of The Times’ London Bureau contributed to this report from Stansted Airport.