Men claiming to be Chechens hijacked a Russian airliner with 174 people on board after it took off from Istanbul yesterday and forced it to fly to Saudi Arabia's holy city of Medina. Vnukovo Airlines said the hijackers were demanding an end to Russia's military campaign against rebels in its breakaway republic of Chechnya.
Early this morning a Saudi official said there had been no contact with the hijackers for some three hours and did not rule out an assault by special forces surrounding the plane if they did not resume negotiations.
Within hours of the aircraft's arrival some 45 people were reported to have either been released or escaped from the Tupolev 154 and Saudi officials initially said they were confident the drama would end soon.
Late last night a Chechen envoy in Jordan said the hijack leader was a former Chechen interior minister. "Artsayev Aslambik, a former general and Chechen interior minister, is the leader of the hijackers," said Ms Atfayva Fariza, a representative of the former Chechen republic.
"The aim of this operation is to bring to the world's attention what is going on in Chechnya and to call for international intervention in the crisis," she said. "This is not a terrorist attack." However, a proChechen press agency in Tbilisi, Georgia, which says it is the outlet for statements by separatist forces in Chechnya, said the rebels fighting Russian rule were not linked to the hijack.
In Medina, the director of Saudi Civil Aviation, Mr Ali al-Khalaf, said that "more than 20 women and children have been released. They are now in our care. We have a team negotiating with the group and dealing with them within the appropriate rules. The crisis is on its way to resolution, God willing.
Not long afterwards, Mr Khalaf and a Russian diplomat in Saudi Arabia said more than 20 other people had managed to escape through a rear exit.
Earlier, Saudi television showed the plane parked at a remote area of the airport with its lights flashing. The footage did not show any security presence around the aircraft.
The plane, originally bound for Moscow, was hijacked at midday yesterday shortly after takeoff from Istanbul. The airline said it was carrying 162 passengers, 98 of them Russian, and 12 crew. The Russian Foreign Ministry said there were 59 Turks on board.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, on a skiing holiday in Siberia, ordered the establishment of a special crisis team of top officials to deal with the hijack, the Kremlin said.
Russian troops are continuing to fight mainly Muslim guerrillas in Chechnya, a region in the Caucasus which they invaded for a second time in 1999 to try to end years of rebel rule.
An explosion outside a book shop in the centre of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, yesterday left one Irishmen and one Egyptian lightly wounded, a Saudi official said. "Both have been treated in hospital and gone home," he said. He could not identify the two victims.