Istanbul Hotel Siege Ends Peacefully With Release of Hostages

Richard Adam was enjoying a quiet late-night drink at the bar of his Istanbul hotel when he heard a piercing scream.

“I heard this woman’s voice screeching, ‘He’s got a gun!’ ” recalled the London-based interior designer, who is originally from New York. “I looked up and saw this shiny piece of metal. I thought it was the tip of a very large umbrella, but then I heard this huge guy shouting very loudly, and the next thing I knew everyone was diving for the floor.

“That’s when I realized things were serious and that he was actually carrying a very big gun.”

Adam, 52, was among about 120 guests and staff members who were taken hostage Sunday by pro-Chechen gunmen at a five-star hotel with a panoramic view of the Bosporus strait. A U.S. consular official said 54 Americans were among them.

Their ordeal ended after 12 hours of negotiations between the 13 gunmen and Turkish authorities. All of the hostages were released unharmed.

In a statement faxed to news organizations during the siege of the Swissotel Bosporus, the gunmen said they were trying to draw attention to the plight of the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya, which they said had been largely ignored by the international media.

The men demanded that the Bush administration call on Russian troops to immediately withdraw from Chechyna. They also demanded an audience with Turkey’s interior minister, Saadettin Tantan, which they received Monday morning.

About 15 minutes later, the gunmen surrendered and were taken away for interrogation. Tantan said he had not bargained with the militants, but rather convinced them that their siege was doing more harm than good to their cause.

German businesswoman Meike Wohne said she was in the lobby when the gunmen stormed the hotel about 11 p.m., firing shots as they came through its main entrance.

“There was much panic, people screaming, and they [the gunmen] spoke a language I could not understand,” she said.

Adam and scores of guests who were seated in the bar area spent several minutes lying on the ground face down.

“There was this Japanese woman lying next to me who kept squeezing my hand and moaning in fear,” Adam said. “Then the terrorist guy started shouting again, and a hotel staff member told us to get up and herded us toward the staff exit. We were all taken to the parking lot at the back of the hotel.”

Adam and dozens of others who had been in the bar managed to slip away. He flagged a taxi and went to another hotel.

But scores of other guests who had been in the lobby, including Wohne, were not so lucky. They were kept by the rebels in a conference hall on the fifth floor of the hotel as negotiations dragged on until early Monday.

Successive Russian governments have accused Turkey of providing arms and training for the Chechen rebels, a claim Turkey vigorously denies.

But wounded Chechen fighters had received free medical treatment at Turkish hospitals until the 1999 election of Turkey’s three-party coalition, led by veteran leftist Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov said in televised remarks Monday night that Russia “once again calls upon Turkish authorities to put an end to a whole number of extremist terrorist organizations that commit crimes [not only in Turkey but] on the territory of Chechnya too. This incident demonstrates these organizations continue to feel quite comfortable in Turkish land.”

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s assistant and spokesman for Chechnya, Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, said Istanbul has ignored Russian warnings about the presence of Chechen “‘terrorist” supporters on Turkish soil.

“It is hard to close one’s eye to the fact that one and the same story takes place on the territory of Turkey again and again and--most important--that the [Turkish] administration is not giving any sufficient response to the people involved in terrorist acts,” he said.

Relations between Turkey and Russia, its largest regional rival and major trading partner, are strained over an array of issues, including their competing ambitions to become the main export route for vast reserves of oil and gas in the former Central Asian Soviet republics and Azerbaijan.

Public sympathy for the Chechens runs strong in Muslim-dominated Turkey, where about 2.5 million citizens trace their origins to the volatile Caucasus region.

Interior Minister Tantan is an ethnic Georgian--one reason, observers speculated, that the gunmen may have demanded to negotiate with him.

But as Turkey’s 65 million people grapple with a financial crisis termed the worst in their country’s modern history, Sunday’s hostage drama has provoked deep anger and fears that the country’s multibillion-dollar tourism industry will be hurt.

The hostage-takers were said by Turkish media to have been led by Mohammed Tokcan, a Turkish citizen of Chechen origin, who in 1996 hijacked a ferry in the Black Sea and held nearly 200 Turks and Russians hostage for 10 days.

Tokcan surrendered and was imprisoned in southwestern Turkey but managed to escape a year later. Turkish police at the Istanbul airport recaptured him in April 1999 as he tried to flee the country on a fake passport. But he was freed along with half of Turkey’s prison population under a controversial amnesty law passed in December.

Mete Nusret Cetinbas, head of the Istanbul-based Caucasus Assn., who took part in the negotiations, said the gunmen had picked the Swissotel because it was frequented by international tourists and a hostage crisis there would command the world’s attention.

The main hotel entrance remained cordoned off for much of the day Monday after the drama ended. Several large bullet holes pocked the glass doors, and shards of glass still lay on the marble floors, the only evidence that a raid had taken place.

At the hotel’s souvenir shops, it was business as usual. Adam said he had no intention of cutting his holiday short.

But Wohne said she and her husband would be taking the next available flight back to Germany. “Not because we dislike Turkey or this hotel, but simply to get over the stress,” she said.

*

Staff writer John Daniszewski in The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.