Pakistan Vows to Try Hijackers If They Enter

01:24 p.m Jan 01, 2000 Eastern

By Raja Asghar

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan said on Saturday it would arrest and try the hijackers of an Indian airliner if they entered the country and dismissed New Delhi's allegation that the five were Pakistanis.

Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider, quoted by the official APP news agency, said the hijackers and the three militants freed by India on Friday to end the eight-day hijack drama, had not entered Pakistan.

``Under no circumstances would these persons be allowed to enter Pakistan,'' he said.

The minister was responding to Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh's statement in New Delhi that the group had headed for the southwestern Pakistani town of Quetta after driving out of the southern Afghan town of Kandahar.

``Pakistan is on high alert, and in case they enter Pakistan territory they will be apprehended and tried as per established international rules and conventions to which Pakistan is signatory,'' APP quoted Haider as saying.

``In case they sneak into NWFP (North West Frontier Province) and Baluchistan province (both bordering Afghanistan), they will be detained and tried according to law and rules.''

Singh had also told a New Delhi news conference earlier on Friday that India's initial inquiries had also revealed that the hijackers were Pakistani nationals.

INDIAN CHARGES ``ALL A LIE''

A Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman dismissed the charge and said: ``Leveling of baseless and false accusations against Pakistan is part...of Indian tactics.''

``This is all a lie,'' spokesman Tariq Altaf told Reuters.

The hijackers on Friday freed 154 hostages from an Indian Airlines aircraft they had seized a week earlier and forced to fly to Kandahar. The release of the hostages was in exchange for the freeing of a Pakistani Muslim cleric and two Kashmiri separatists jailed by India.

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement, which brokered the deal between the hijackers and the Indian government, said earlier on Saturday that the hijackers and the militants had left the country but it did not know their destination.

``Those people are no more in Afghanistan,'' a Pakistan-based Afghan news service quoted a Taliban official as saying.

The December 24 hijacking of the Indian Airbus-300 during a flight from Kathmandu to New Delhi sparked a war of words between arch-rivals India and Pakistan.

New Delhi voiced suspicions that the hijacking had been sponsored by Pakistani intelligence agencies. Islamabad in turn said the incident appeared to be the work of India's Research and Analysis Wing intelligence agency to defame Pakistan.

The two countries have fought three wars since their independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over the disputed Himalayan region of Jammu and Kashmir.