Word: pakistanis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...days. In an escalating series of ultimatums, they had killed one passenger and threatened to blow up the others. Finally they had hit the jackpot: they won the release of 54 prisoners from Pakistan's President Mo hammed Zia ul-Haq - and apparent freedom for themselves. The Pakistani prisoners, many of them accused murderers and all of them opponents of Zia's military regime, were duly flown to Damascus. As for the hijackers, their surrender to Syrian authorities appeared to be a mere formality on the road to convenient "disappearance...
...were the Soviet and Afghan authorities at Kabul airport, where the hijacked plane stayed for six days. Despite repeated entreaties from Islamabad and Washington, they had shown little willingness to work toward ending the standoff. There were the Syrian officials in Damascus, who refused to let Zia send a Pakistani antiterrorist unit and also declined to launch a Syrian commando raid against the hijackers. There was Zia himself, who apparently had no military option left and therefore chose to give in to the demands to avoid a "bloodbath." Finally, there was the Libyan government, which initially offered asylum...
...Syrians were left to pick up the pieces. They accepted the Pakistani prisoners, put them up temporarily in the Damascus airport hotel and granted them "asylum." Syrian authorities seemed less certain what to call the disposition of the hijackers. A government spokesman said they were not being granted formal political asylum but rather, temporary refuge for "humanitarian" reasons. In light of Syria's past habit of letting hijackers disappear, neither prosecution of the threesome nor their return to Pakistan seemed likely...
...gunmen had been wanted by Pakistani authorities even before the hijacking. The trio's 22-year-old leader, Salamullah Khan, a former science student at Karachi's Jinnah College, was accused of murder and other serious crimes. Nasir Jamal Khan, 22, also a former science student, was allegedly involved in the killing of another undergraduate. Only the third hijacker, Arshad Hussain, who was also a Karachi college student, had no previous police record...
...named for ex-President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom Zia deposed and had executed in 1979. An American passenger on the ill-fated flight, Frederick Hubbell, 29, said the hijackers were "deliberately erratic. Sometimes they were kind, sometimes they became very brutal-after all, they killed a man." Their victim: Pakistani Diplomat Tariq Rahim, shot in full view of the other passengers and dumped on the tarmac at Kabul...