Hijackers free passengers from Sudanese plane forced to land in Libya - but keep crew prisoner

State-run Egyptian television said passengers left the plane this morning. Libya's Civil Aviation Authority said 95 passengers had been on the Boeing 737/200.

The airliner was seized on Tuesday after leaving Sudan's war-battered Darfur region and was forced to land in the remote Sahara desert oasis of Kufrah. The hijackers said they were members of a Darfur rebel faction.

"At the moment there is no information on why the man hijacked the plane,"  said Mortada Hassan, executive manager of Sun Air.

"The only demands we know about are for food and fuel and to allow the plane to fly to France."

He added that the news had come from Sudanese security and civil aviation officers who have been receiving regular updates from Tripoli.

Up to ten hijackers commandeered the Boeing 737 jetliner, which was carrying nearly 100 people, soon after it took off yesterday from Nyala in the south of Darfur, a vast region where Sudan's government has been battling rebels since 2003.

In this Thursday, July 31, 2008 file picture Libyan anti-terrorism special forces attack a Libyan plane during a training exercise at their camp in Tripoli. The hijacked Sudanese plane has been forced to land in Libya

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 desert oasis of Kufra.

Kufra airport director Khaled Sasiya spoke to one of the hijackers, who demanded maps to fly to Paris and fuel for the plane, the JANA report said.

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 and that they were refusing to negotiate, according to the news agency's report.

SLM-Nour spokesman Yahia Bolad denied any involvement, saying his group has "no relation to this act."

Asked if French authorities could accept the hijackers arriving in France, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told Europe-1 radio that he could "not say anything now. But we are considering everything so that the passengers, the 100 passengers, are protected."

Kouchner also said that rebel leader Abdel Wahid Nur, who lives in Paris, denied he was in contact with the hijackers.

"He says he doesn't know these people and that he absolutely refuses to use such methods," Kouchner said. "It's not his way. He's rather a peaceful man."

The hijacked airliner belongs to a private company, Sun Air, and was carrying 95 people, including crew and passengers, the Sudanese civil aviation authority said in a statement carried by the Sudan Media Center, which has close links to the government.

The Kufra airport director said the hijacker he spoke to told him that the poor air conditioning system inside the aircraft was creating breathing problems for passengers and that some had fainted.

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. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

There was conflicting information about the hijackers' identities and how many there were.

A Libyan official at the Kufra airport said on Tuesday that there were 10 hijackers belonging to a Darfur rebel group and that they were demanding enough fuel to continue to France.

The rebels quickly denied the accusation.

The official Sudanese news agency, SUNA, reported today that Sun Air put the number of the hijackers at four.

Sudan's consul in Kufra, Mohammed al-Bila Othman, told SUNA there were some 500 security and police personnel at the airport as well as ambulances and firefighting vehicles.

The chief of police of the southern Darfur province, Maj. Gen. Fathul-Rahamn Othman, told SUNA that the hijacking was meant to "destabilize security and is part of the events taking part in the Darfur provinces."

Darfur's ethnic African rebels have been battling the Arab-led Khartoum government since 2003 in a conflict that the U.N. says has killed up to 300,000 people and driven 2.5 million from their homes.

In the worst attack in months, the Sudanese military on Monday assaulted the Darfur refugee camp of Kalma, near Nyala airport, from where the hijacked plane took off.

A spokesman for Darfur's U.N.-African Union peacekeepers, Nourredine Mezni, said at least 33 people killed in the attack were buried yesterday, though some U.N. officials said the toll could be higher.

A spokesman for one of the rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, Ahmed Hussain, said he had reports of 70 dead. He accused the government in the hijacking, saying it was trying to "divert attention" from Monday's attack.