TRIPOLI (AFP) — Hijackers claiming to be Darfur rebels agreed on Wednesday to free women and children among around 100 passengers on board a Sudanese jet stranded at a remote airport in the sweltering Libyan desert.
A Libyan official said the hijackers "agreed this morning to our request to free" women and children aboard the Sun Air Boeing 737, hijacked shortly after takeoff from Darfur's main city Nyala on Tuesday and bound for Khartoum.
The jet was granted permission to land by Libyan authorities at the isolated World War II-era Kufra airport in the southeast of the country after it ran short on fuel.
The passengers were reportedly given water but no food and some fainted when the air conditioning failed in the searing desert heat.
"We still don't have much idea of how many hijackers there are or what group they are in," the Libyan official said, requesting anonymity.
No movement has claimed public responsibility, but the director of Kufra airport said they belong to a faction of the Sudanese Liberation Army, whose exiled leader Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur lives in Paris.
"The plane's pilot has indicated that the hijackers, who number 10 or maybe more ... have said they belong to the Sudanese Liberation Army of Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur," Khaled Saseya told Libya's official JANA news agency.
The pilot said "the hijackers claim to have coordinated with him (Nur) to join him in Paris," he added.
Saseya said the hijackers have demanded a flight plan to Paris and fuel.
But Nur, whose group was one of two movements that first rose up against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government in Darfur in 2003, denied any involvement.
"We categorically deny the responsibility of our movement in this hijacking operation," Nur said in a telephone interview on Al-Jazeera television.
The SLA has fractured into multiple groups headed by different field commanders over the more than five years of war in Sudan's western Darfur region.
In Paris, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said that "everything is being considered" to protect the lives of those on board, while not saying explicitly whether France was prepared to receive the plane.
"If (Libyan leader) Colonel (Moamer) Kadhafi can convince the hijackers, and not harm the lives of the passengers, that's good, but otherwise everything must be done for the passengers' lives," Kouchner told Europe 1 radio.
Nur "is a true leader of a rebellion, of the resistance in Darfur, who says that he does not know these people and that he absolutely refuses to use these methods," Kouchner said.
With the crisis moving into a second day, several passengers fainted after the plane's air conditioning system failed, the pilot told airport officials.
The airline's head of security, Hamza Hasan, said the Libyan officials had given passengers water but no food, and that a representative from the Sudanese embassy in Tripoli was on the ground in Kufra.
Abdel Hafez Abdel Rahim, spokesman for Sudan's Civil Aviation Authority, said there were 95 people on the plane, including eight crew members and among the 87 passengers were two Egyptians and a Kenyan.
"There is no actual confirmed information about the number of hijackers. One of them went to the cockpit but maybe some other people were behind him.
"Apparently he had (a weapon)," said the spokesman, although the type of weapon has not been confirmed.
"Until now, no one declared responsibility for the hijacking. All the rebels until now denied the operation," the spokesman said.
On Monday, Sudanese security forces pushed into one of the biggest and most volatile camps for displaced people in Darfur at Kalma, just outside the hijacked plane's point of departure, Nyala.
UN-led peacekeepers said 33 people were buried on Tuesday following armed clashes between police and camp residents.
Three high-ranking members of a former Darfur rebel movement that signed a peace treaty with the government in 2006 were on the hijacked flight, said an official in the Minni Minawi faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement.
Sudan has a history of hijacking incidents, having both received and been the country of origin of hijacked planes.
The United Nations says that up to 300,000 people have died and more than 2.2 million fled their homes since the Darfur conflict erupted in February 2003. Sudan says 10,000 have been killed.
The war began when ethnic minority rebels rose up against the Arab-dominated regime and state-backed Arab militias, fighting for resources and power.
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