The Gulf: Horror Abroad Flight 221

Gun-toting terrorists bring murder and mayhem to a hijacked Kuwaiti Airbus

Shrouded in mist and falling snow, the blue-and-white Kuwait Airways A-310 Airbus looked as if it had been scuttled and abandoned in a remote corner of Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. Most of the shades were tightly drawn, and there were few signs of life within. But Kuwaitis monitoring air-to-ground radio broadcasts picked up bloodcurdling sounds from the jet: they were the anguished shrieks and hysterical crying of a man being tortured and maimed. For those watching the tense drama developing, there were glimpses of gun-toting youths with checkered Arab headcloths drawn over their faces, and then the gruesome evidence of the hell unfolding for the 161 passengers and crew inside the grounded Airbus: the body of an American, stripped of all identifying papers, ignominiously dumped on the snow-dusted tarmac.

Once again, it seemed, the world was held hostage by a small and fanatic band of terrorists bent on wresting political concessions by menacing innocents. The four or five Arab-speaking gunmen who commandeered Kuwait Airways Flight 221 to Karachi, Pakistan, last Tuesday were believed to be linked to the Hizballah (Party of God). This is the same pro-Khomeini Shi’ite group, based in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, that some U.S. officials think may have been responsible for killing more than 300 people in last year’s bombing attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut. Bombers also hit the U.S. embassy and other targets in Kuwait on Dec. 12, 1983, and Kuwaiti officials took a tough stand; 17 terrorists were brought to trial and sentenced to death or terms in prison. It was in the hope of forcing Kuwait to release the imprisoned terrorists that the hijackers set out on the murderous road that led to the bleak tarmac in Tehran.

Although this latest act of air piracy followed a grimly familiar pattern, it threatened to surpass other hijackings in sheer brutality. By week’s end the terrorists had butchered at least four of their captives, including two Americans. They freed 146 hostages, but for the dozen or so men who remained on board, tied to their seats, conditions were said to be horrendous. There were reports that the Airbus had been disabled late Friday night by bursts of gunfire that shattered windows in the cockpit and cabin. A freed Pakistani passenger said the hostages had tried unsuccessfully to overpower their captors. The Iranian government news agency claimed that the hijackers would soon “put all the Americans aboard the plane on trial” and had beaten one of the two remaining American hostages. None of the stories could be confirmed.

There were no signs that the Iranians, who were giving the events extensive television coverage, were prepared-or able-to end the terror aboard the Airbus. Said Robert Oakley, director of the U.S. State Department Office of Counterterrorism: “We feel there is a great deal of sympathy, if not support and active collusion, on the part of the Iranian government.” President Reagan declared at a press conference that the Iranians “have not been as helpful as they could be in this situation, or as I think they should have been.” But he left open the possibility that Tehran might have a change of heart.

Two months ago U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz bluntly stated that the U.S. “must be willing to use military force” to combat terrorism. Said Shultz: “One of the best deterrents is the certainty that swift and sure measures will be taken against those who engage in it.” But as frustrated U.S. officials tried to piece together a complete picture of what was going on at Mehrabad Airport, it seemed all too clear that a policy of retaliation had serious limitations. There was little that the U.S. could have done to prevent such a random act of terrorism. Indeed, in the absence of diplomatic relations with Iran, Washington could only depend on the help of Swiss and British intermediaries.

While anxiously waiting in Washington, U.S. officials debated whether it was feasible or even wise to plan reprisals against Shi’ite militants in Lebanon. “Whom would we hit and where?” asked a State Department official. Other groups, claiming to be associated with the Hizballah, are holding three Americans hostage in Lebanon: U.S. Diplomat William Buckley, first secretary of the embassy’s political section; Cable News Network Correspondent Jeremy Levin; and Presbyterian Minister Benjamin Weir. Last week a fourth American disappeared: Peter Kilburn, a librarian at Beirut’s American University. A retaliatory raid in Lebanon might seal their fate.

The journey that was unfolding so violently had an ordinary enough beginning. Flight 221 to Karachi is usually filled with expatriate Pakistani workers returning home after a year or two in Kuwait. The flight last week was no exception, and at least 120 Pakistanis patiently waited to check in at Kuwait International Airport with their newly acquired portable stereos and TV sets and with well-stuffed oversize suitcases. They were joined by at least ten Kuwaitis, including three diplomats heading for the Karachi consulate, as well as a team of three American auditors from the U.S. Agency for International Development, an American businessman and a handful of other foreigners. The takeoff proved uneventful, and the passengers settled back for the 530-mile, 1½-hour flight to Dubai.

It was during this scheduled stopover that some of the hijackers probably slipped on board. Security officials at Dubai International Airport had spent a busy night ensuring that Britain’s Princess Anne departed safely after her three-day visit to the gulf. So they were not overly thorough in checking passengers hurrying through to catch the plane to Karachi, which was leaving at about the same time as the royal flight. Several youths in their 20s who had arrived on a connecting flight from Beirut evidently managed to bypass a security check in the transit lounge and went directly to the departure gate.

The plane had been airborne no more than 15 minutes when the men took control of the aircraft and ordered the pilot to turn the Airbus toward Iran. One Kuwaiti was reportedly shot and wounded in the leg during the brief scuffle. Tehran has gained a reputation as a haven for air pirates ever since three terrorists diverted an Air

France 737 jet to Mehrabad Airport last July. But Iran was not so quick to put out the welcome mat early last Tuesday for the latest hijackers. The control tower in Tehran refused at first to give the Airbus permission to land and agreed only after the pilot sent a message that he was running low on fuel. The plane was immediately shunted off to a remote runway and surrounded by heavily armed soldiers, police and emergency vehicles.

The eerie morning stillness was broken by the sound of shooting in the airplane cabin. The terrorists, led by a young man identified only as Abu Saleh, pushed open the door and flung the body of their first victim onto the runway. The hijackers had ordered all Kuwaitis and Americans to move to the forward section soon after the plane landed. During the ensuing confusion they apparently selected one American and summarily executed him. Assisted by Swiss diplomats, who made visits to the Tehran morgue, U.S. officials confirmed later in the week that they were “99% certain” that the murdered man was Charles Hegna, 50, an AID officer from Sterling, Va.

As radio negotiations dragged on between the plane and control towers in Tehran and Kuwait, the hijackers pressed their demands. Finally, they agreed to let some of the 161 on board the Airbus leave. First, 46 women and children, including an American married to a Pakistani, and her daughter, made their way across the airstrip. All had been stripped of their personal papers and any identifying documents. They were followed by 23 Pakistanis and, later in the week, by a group of 30 men. The terrorists let eight more hostages go on Friday, and at week’s end they released 39 men, most of them Pakistanis.

Information on the number of hostages who were murdered was hard to obtain and often contradictory. On Thursday morning the hijackers allowed an Iranian photographer to approach the door of the plane. While they held a gun to his head, he looked inside the cabin and saw two hostages lying on the floor outside the cockpit. He could not tell whether they were dead or alive.

Later the same day, Iranian television cameras recorded a macabre scene at the top of the landing ramp. Gunmen wearing hoods pushed two hostages out through the door and handed a bullhorn to one of them. The man, who was wearing a white shirt, nervously introduced himself as the U.S. consul in Karachi and pleaded with negotiators to yield to the hijackers’ demands. He said that they had begun a “countdown,” and warned that “they are serious about their threats.” The hostages were taken back inside the plane, but five minutes later the man in the white shirt reappeared atop the ramp. He could be heard screaming as the hijackers coldly took aim and fired six shots into him. His body was also thrown onto the runway. U.S. officials denied that the American envoy to Karachi was on the plane and established later that the victim was William Stanford, 52, an AID official stationed in Pakistan.

After temporarily breaking off all radio contact on Friday, the terrorists called the control tower and demanded that Iranian officials broadcast a statement over the Arabic service of the Voice of the Islamic Revolution. Iran willingly complied. The hijackers called for the release from Kuwaiti prisons of their “innocent brothers,” who they claimed had been tortured by “the joint butchering machine” of Kuwait, the U.S. and France. They admitted murdering two Americans and vowed to kill a third, whom they identified as “Charles Kipper,” along with three Kuwaiti diplomats if their demands were not met. The American and Kuwaiti hostages, the hijackers declared, were “no more than a group of criminals who deserve to be killed according to the judgment of God and the Koran” and would never be let go, only “killed or buried under the aircraft wreckage.”

Given the cold-blooded zealotry of the hijackers, there appeared to be no easy way out of the standoff at Mehrabad. A negotiated settlement was out of the question. Staunchly backed by Washington, Kuwaiti officials refused even to consider the terrorists’ demands. Instead, they concentrated their diplomatic efforts on prodding Iran to take the necessary action. Algeria and Syria were enlisted as go-betweens, and the six states of the Gulf Cooperative Council bombarded Tehran with messages urging the Khomeini regime to make sure, as Tariq Almoayed, Bahrain’s Minister of Information, put it, that “those who have committed crimes in Iran are punished in Iran.”

But Iran’s options also appeared to be limited. Given the Khomeini regime’s past expressions of support for anti-American terrorists in the Middle East, Iran was not likely to besmirch its image by staging a daring raid to rescue American and Kuwaiti hostages. Even if Tehran had the political will to challenge the militants, it probably lacked the military know-how to carry off such a risky mission without endangering the lives of all the hostages on board. And without the direct cooperation of Iranian officials, no outside power was likely to intervene to end the deadlock by military means. In an effort to pin the blame on Kuwait, Iranian radio reported last week that Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati said Iran was ready to “bring about a military solution,” but Kuwait refused to approve the plan.

Iran did have the power to exert religious and psychological pressure on the Islamic militants. Not all the pro-Iranian factions of militant Lebanese Shi’ites appeared to be in agreement with the hijackers’ tactics. A man claiming to represent Islamic Jihad, a shadowy group that is thought to be an umbrella organization for various terrorists in the region, called a news agency in Beirut to deny responsibility for the hijacking. He expressed support for the terrorists but urged them “not to get the Islamic Republic involved in the case.” The Iranian government’s best hope for ending the siege, perhaps, would have been to enlist the mullahs and other influential Shi’ite leaders to persuade the terrorists that the hijacking was not in the greater interests of the Islamic revolution.

Terrorism, in the words of Secretary of State Shultz, is “a new kind of warfare.” As the tragic events at Mehrabad Airport demonstrated, the outcome of this conflict could ultimately be determined as much by strength of will as by strength of arms. At week’s end there appeared to be no logical way to cope with a few angry and fanatic men who had killed-and were vowing to kill again. -By John Kohan.

Reported by Barry Hillenbrand/Bahrain and Johanna McGeary/Washington