A team of Indian negotiators has left New Delhi for the Afghan city of Kandahar to begin direct talks with the hijackers who are holding 155 hostages on an Indian Airlines plane. The aircraft on which the negotiators are travelling is also carrying relief supplies for the hostages, whose ordeal is now in its fourth day. An Indian diplomat has already been in radio contact with the hijackers from the control tower at the airport. They are demanding that the Indian government release a Muslim cleric, Maulana Masood Azhar, jailed in Kashmir, but a deadline they set this morning has been extended until later today.
Earlier the hijackers, who have been holding the plane in Afghanistan since Christmas Eve, renewed their threat to start killing hostages if their demand to free Azhar was not met. A United Nations official, Erik de Mul, who spoke to the hijackers at Kandahar airport, said that they had told him they would begin killing the passengers shortly after 8am this morning. However that deadline passed without apparent incident. Afghanistan's ruling Taleban militia has warned that its troops will storm the airliner if the gunmen carry out their threats to start killing their captives.
The Indian Airline plane has been refuelled and the Taleban government is insisting that it move on. But the five Kashmiri hijackers have threatened to crash the plane if they are forced to leave. There has been anger amongst the hostages' families that the aircraft was allowed to land in a country which has no diplomatic ties with India, a situation which complicates negotiations. But a spokesman for the Indian foreign ministry, RS Jasal, insisted that his government was working to end the crisis.
