Hijackers of a Sudanese airliner surrendered to authorities in Libya after releasing all the passengers yesterday, Libya’s aviation authority said.
The airliner was seized on Tuesday after leaving Sudan’s war-battered Darfur region for Khartoum and landed at the remote Sahara desert oasis of Kufrah in southeastern Libya.
Libya’s Civil Aviation Authority said 95 people had been on the Boeing 737/200.
The hijackers first released the passengers and two crew members, but kept six crew members hostage while negotiations continued.
“The two hijackers were transported to one of the halls at Kufrah airport after giving themselves up,” Libyan state news agency Jana cited aviation authority head Mohamed Shlibek as saying.
He said no one was left on the plane after all the passengers and crew were released. There was no immediate word on the identity of the hijackers.
Shlibek said the hijackers had demanded that the plane be refueled to fly to Paris. Sudan’s Civil Aviation Authority said the two hijackers had demanded refugee status there.
The pilot had told Libyan authorities they were from a branch of the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM), a Darfur rebel group, and wanted to meet their leader Abdel Wahed Mohammed al-Nur in Paris, Jana said.
But Nur’s faction denied the hijackers were its members.
“We categorically deny the responsibility of our movement in this hijacking operation,” he said in a telephone interview on al-Jazeera TV.
Another SLM faction that signed a 2006 deal with Khartoum, which was rejected by Nur, said the passengers on the hijacked plane had included seven of its officers, three of them members of a transitional Darfur regional government.
The plane took off from the South Darfur capital, Nyala, bound for Khartoum. Libya granted permission for the plane to land after the pilot said it was running out of fuel, Libya’s state news agency said.
All the passengers were Sudanese except two Egyptian police officers, two Ethiopians and one Ugandan.
The passengers had reportedly been given water but no food and some fainted when the air conditioning failed in the searing desert heat.
Sudan earlier called on the Libyan authorities to arrest and deport to Khartoum the “terrorist” hijackers, saying that Libya was being “very helpful” as the crisis entered its second day.
“We are condemning first the hijacking of a civilian airplane and we are now in continuous contact and consultation with the Libyan authorities in Kufra airport,” Sudanese foreign ministry spokesman Ali al-Sadiq said.
Before the surrender, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in France that “everything is being considered” to protect the lives of those on board, while not saying explicitly whether France was prepared to receive the plane.
Nur “is a true leader of a rebellion, of the resistance in Darfur, who says that he does not know these people and that he absolutely refuses to use these methods,” Kouchner told Europe 1 radio.
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