Cuban soldiers held after hijacking

Two fugitive army recruits tried to hijack a plane to the United States early Thursday and killed a Cuban military officer among their hostages, authorities said.

The fugitives commandeered a bus with at least seven passengers, witnesses said, and were arrested after a shootout before dawn on the tarmac of Jose Marti International Airport.

They and a third recruit, captured before the shootout, had been the focus of a manhunt. They had escaped Sunday with automatic rifles from the Managua military base, about 15 miles from the airport, after killing a fellow soldier, identified as Yoendris Gutierrez Hernandez, and wounding another, an Interior Ministry statement said.

Sources who requested anonymity identified the recruits, all from the eastern province of Camaguey, as Leandro Cerezo Sirut and Alain Forbus Lameru, both 19, and Yoan Torres Martinez, 21. It was unclear which of them was captured earlier.

Witnesses said the recruits hijacked the bus Wednesday shortly before midnight and ordered the driver to crash through a gate leading to the runway.

The hijackers and their hostages then boarded an empty plane, the Interior Ministry statement said.

On the plane, one of the hijackers slashed the army officer across the torso with a bayonet when the officer tried to disarm him, said an airport employee who asked not to be identified.

The statement identified the slain officer as Lt. Col. Victor Ibo Acuna Velazquez.

“Despite being unarmed, [Acuna] heroically tried to prevent the commission of the terrorist act,” the statement said. The other hostages were unhurt.

Witnesses who live near the runway gates said police vehicles, ambulances and cars presumably carrying government officials surrounded the airport. From about 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. Thursday, they said, the hijackers opened fire from windows on the plane nearly every hour, demanding that pilots be sent.

At one point, witnesses said, they could hear the mother of one of the hijackers, speaking through a bullhorn.

“I could hear the mother screaming, ‘Yoandri, Yoandri, this is your mother! Please give yourself up. Your little brothers are here. Come to us, please,’ ” said one witness, Leonol Coca.

Witnesses said they saw the sky light up about 4 a.m., when police surrounding the plane opened fire.