News Article by AP posted on August 27, 2008 at 10:18:07: EST (-5 GMT)
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Sudan hijackers free passengers in Libya TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) -- The hijackers of a plane that took off from the Darfur region in Sudan released all the passengers Wednesday after landing hours earlier at a remote desert airfield in southern Libya, a civil aviation official said. The official said, however, that crew members were not being allowed off the plane. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Hijackers commandeered the Boeing 737 jetliner, which was carrying 95 passengers and crew, soon after it took off Tuesday from the southern Darfur town of Nyala, not far from a refugee camp that the Sudanese military attacked on Monday. Sudanese forces and their militia allies have been battling rebels in the vast western region since 2003. The plane, which had been en route to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, was diverted to a World War II-era airstrip in Libya's Sahara oasis of Kufra. Mohammed Shleibek, chief of Libya's civil aviation authority, told the official news agency JANA that negotiations between his agency and the hijackers resulted in the release of all passengers. Negotiators were trying to persuade the hijackers to surrender, he said. JANA reported there were 87 passengers and 8 crew members. Earlier on Wednesday, Kufra airport director Khaled Sasiya spoke to one of the hijackers, who demanded maps to fly to Paris and fuel, JANA reported. Sasiya said the man, who identified himself as Yassin, told him that he and his fellow hijackers were from the Darfur rebel Sudan Liberation Movement led by Abdel Wahid Nur, according to the news agency's report. The rebel leader denied his group was involved. "We categorically deny that the Sudan Liberation Movement has carried out the hijacking," Nur said, speaking to Al Jazeera television by telephone. Asked if the French authorities would be willing to allow the hijackers to arrive in France, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France told Europe 1 radio he could not "say anything now. But we are considering everything so that the passengers, the 100 passengers, are protected." Kouchner also said that Nur, who lives in Paris, denied he was in contact with the hijackers. Among the passengers were former rebels who have become members of the Darfur Transitional Authority, an interim government body responsible for implementing a peace agreement reached in 2006 between the government and one of the rebel factions, a security official at Nyala airport said.
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