- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 February 2000 16.31 GMT
However, after 25 hours of negotiations, the only request made by hijackers so far is for food, water and medication. Essex assistant chief constable John Broughton, who has been briefing the press was adamant that no demands or threats have been made. He said: "Obviously I have to be careful about what I say here as I would not want to jeopardise anyone's safety, but at this time, they have not made any specific requests or demands that I am aware of." Meanwhile the Afghan opposition, the northern alliance, has disassociated itself from the hijacking, calling it an act of terrorism against innocent people.
• A conspiracy theory mooted in an online chat group is that the hijackers are working for the Taliban in an effort to discredit the opposition, the northern alliance. The Taliban has condemned the hijackers as terrorists and says it will not negotiate with them or accept any of their demands. A statement said the Taliban believed the hijackers were "closely connected" to the main opposition commander, Ahmed Shah Masoud.
• In Afghanistan itself, some relatives of the hostages have told the BBC World Service that this might be an opportunity for the passengers to get asylum and escape from a poor, devastated country in the grip of a hardline Islamist regime. According to this theory the pilots were in on the escape or even instigated the flight.
This would not be the first time that a plane has been hijacked as a desperate resort to escape a repressive regime. In August 1996, seven Iraqis seized a Sudan Airways Airbus A310 fleeing Saddam Hussein. The plane landed at Stansted. The hijack ended after eight hours of tense negotiations. The hijackers were jailed for at the Old Bailey for between five to nine years each but they were later cleared by the court of appeal in December 1998. Human rights campaigners hailed the appeal decision as a precedent for refugees fleeing brutal regimes. The court held that the judge at the men's trial had wrongly prevented the jury considering their defence that they acted under "duress of circumstances".
Delivering his ruling at the time, Lord Justice Rose said: "If Anne Frank had stolen a car to escape from Amsterdam and had been charged with theft, the tenets of English law would not have denied her the defence of duress of circumstances on the ground that she should have awaited the Gestapo's knock at the door."
