ISTANBUL, Turkey — The hijackers of a Black Sea ferry tossed their weapons overboard, freed 242 hostages and surrendered to Turkish security forces Friday, peacefully ending a three-day ordeal that had threatened to embroil Turkey in a separatist conflict in Russia.
"It's over? Thank God!" Turkish Adm. Taner Uzunay said over the radio after the Turkish captain of the ferry Avraziya told him that the seven pro-Chechen hijackers had left the ferry under arrest on a naval launch.
The hostages, including 114 Russians, appeared unharmed.
Despite Moscow's urging to use force, Turkey met the crisis with negotiations but no concessions.
Shotgun-toting hijackers with grenades on their coats and knives in their belts had threatened to blow up the ferry unless the Russian army ended a siege of Chechen hostage-takers in the southern Russian village of Pervomayskaya.
That demand was overtaken by events when the village fell to Russian forces Thursday.
Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller stood firm against the hijackers' demand that they be allowed to sail to Istanbul and hold a news conference. Chechen separatist leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev also urged them to end their action without bloodshed.
"I told them this is not our business, especially not in Turkey," said Shemsettin Yusuf, a Dudayev emissary. "It is not the way to help Chechnya. The people of Turkey are supporting us, so it's a shame to spoil it."
"There was no bargaining," Ciller said. "We told them there was no way they could get away with this kind of thing."
While vowing to prosecute the hijackers, the Turkish leader said long-term stability in the Black Sea region depends on Russia's willingness to end its 13-month-old ethnic war against breakaway Chechnya. The conflict cost more than 20,000 lives last year and flared anew this month in the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan.
But Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, summing up 10 days of conflict with the Chechens in Dagestan, vowed Friday to press his military campaign into the separatist "dens" of Chechnya's mountains.
"Those dens which have been spotted by the intelligence service--and there are mountains of weapons and ammunition there, as Pervomayskaya demonstrated--constitute a threat, a great threat," Yeltsin told a news conference in Moscow. "These strongholds will now begin to be wiped out."
The Russian leader defended the massive artillery assault on rebel-held Pervomayskaya, saying, "Mad dogs must be shot."
