South Asia faces increasing risk of plane hijacks

By Paul Taylor

LONDON (Reuters): The days when hijackers plagued the skies of the Middle East and rattled Western governments may be gone, but two hijacks in South Asia in the last two months suggest air piracy may be on the rise in that tense region.

Western officials are worried that the success of Kashmiri separatist gunmen who hijacked an Indian Airlines plane to Afghanistan in December may have set a dangerous precedent, emboldening imitators.

Hijackers opposed to Afghanistan's ruling Taleban movement seized an Afghan plane carrying 186 people on an internal flight on Sunday and forced it to fly to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia and eventually to Stansted airport outside London.

"The moment you see governments cooperating with or giving in to hijackers anywhere in the world, you have to worry about the knock-on effect, the example it sets," a West European counter- terrorism official said.

He said the Group of Eight (G-8) industrialized powers was extremely concerned about the Dec. 24-31 incident in which six hijackers boarded an Indian jet in Nepal and made it fly to the Afghan city of Kandahar, forcing the Indian government to agree to let three Kashmiri militants out of jail.

One Western diplomat said the Kandahar marathon was the first successful hijack in 19 years in which the gunmen had achieved all their objectives and escaped scot free.

The United States accused neighboring Pakistan of backing the Harkat ul-Mujahideen group blamed for the hijacking. The New York Times quoted U.S. officials as warning that Islamabad could be put on Washington's list of "state sponsors of terrorism".

"I do see a risk of increased hijacking in that region because it is clear from the leeway that was given to the escaped hijackers that this was regarded as a victory," said Steven Simon, assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Lawless Afghanistan, where many men carry guns and airport security is scanty, has long been regarded as one of the weakest links in international air security.

Ariana is barred from flying out of Afghan airspace under UN sanctions because the Taleban have failed to extradite Saudi guerrilla chieftain Osama bin Laden, blamed by Washington for two 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa.

Simon, a White House counter-terrorism expert until last year, said only a handful of countries had specialized military or police squads skilled in overpowering hijackers and rescuing hostages.

France demonstrated how effective such a force could be in 1994 when police commandos stormed an Air France plane that had been hijacked to Marseille from Algiers by four Algerian Islamist gunmen, who had killed three passengers. The police killed all the hijackers and freed the remaining passengers.

The effective use of force to end hijacks is reckoned to have a powerful deterrent effect on political radicals.

But countries such as India have no such capability. Egypt demonstrated how such efforts could go wrong when its commandos bungled an attempt to storm a hijacked Air Egypt plane in 1985 and 59 people died.

Security was tightened at airports across Europe, the United States and the Middle East after a wave of mainly Palestinian- inspired air piracy in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The Palestine Liberation Organization has since eschewed all forms of terrorism and is negotiating peace with Israel. Even radical Middle East governments hostile to the Jewish state no longer condone hijacking or attacks on aircraft.

In an important symbol of changed times, Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi last year turned over to Scottish justice two Libyan agents accused of the mid-air bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie in 1989.

According to a U.S. State Department survey, Patterns of Global Terrorism, hijacks accounted for only two out of a total of 273 international "terrorist" incidents in 1999 worldwide, making them statistically insignificant.

"In most of the world, hijacking has pretty much run its course. The greatest threat today is from religious terrorists using increasingly big bombs, not from hijackers," Simon said.

Officials of the G-8 -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada -- have met regularly since 1996 to coordinate counter-terrorism policy, share intelligence on extremists and cooperate on security.

Western governments officially share a policy of refusing to negotiate with hijackers, except about the safety of the passengers and the terms of their surrender, and wherever possible preventing hijacked planes from taking off again.

The greatest risk is in poor countries with lax airport security, inadequate detection equipment, undertrained and ill- paid police and weak intelligence.

For example, Simon said the United States had cooperated with the Nepalese authorities for years to combat air piracy, but there was a limit to what such assistance could achieve.