EX-HOSTAGE TELLS OF ORDEAL; GLAD HIJACKING ENDED PEACEFULLY CONDITIONS 'UNCOMFORTABLE' ABOARD HIJACKED AIRLINER.

Byline: Donna Huffaker Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES - Describing eight days of uncertainty and terror, Jeanne Moore, the only American aboard hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814, spoke publicly for the first time Wednesday about her ordeal.

``It was a bad situation - not knowing what was going to happen to us. How were our families going to react?,'' the former Burbank resident said at a news conference Wednesday at KCET Studios.

``The heat, the lighting, the fumes. Sometimes there was no food. ''

Sometimes the hijackers whispered, she said. Sometimes they told the hostages jokes.

And sometimes they stuck guns in the faces of the passengers and ran past them carrying grenades.

Then on New Year's Eve, it ended suddenly. When the last terrorist walked off Indian Air Flight 814 and told the 155 passengers he loved them, Moore was just glad the hijacking ended with a whimper instead of a bang. She had survived.

``A lot of us like to think we were heroes,'' the 53-year-old Bakersfield resident said.

Moore flew into Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday but ducked a mob of reporters and met her family for a quiet reunion. She opted to tell her story to reporters at KCET on Wednesday in a more controlled environment, she said.

Moore walked into the public television station holding hands with her daughters Lisa Salas and Michelle Twisselman, saying hers has always been a hand-holding family, but even more so since she's returned safely from the harrowing ordeal.

Terrorists seized Flight 814 on Christmas Eve after it took off from Nepal. It landed in Afghanistan after flying across South Asia and the Mideast. The hostages were freed New Year's Eve after India agreed to trade them for three Pakistani prisoners.

Although the terrorists killed one of the passengers the first day, the rest of the hostages did not know about the murder until they were freed. Still, Moore said, she and the other victims feared they could be killed at any moment.

At one point, Moore, who was born in Los Angeles and raised in Burbank, was talking to one of the hijackers, whom she and the other hostages referred to as their ``hosts,'' and she asked them for some bananas. At first the hijackers responded with a bag of eight bananas but Moore persisted and within hours a shipment was delivered to the passengers, she said.

She slept roughly two to three hours a night, she said, and contracted pneumonia during the crisis.

``It was uncomfortable,'' she said. The smell aboard the cramped jetliner was so putrid that at times she thought she would pass out.

Answering questions slowly and flanked by her two daughters, Moore grew emotional only once during the hour-long news conference. She was relating the story of a woman who had been told by the terrorists she could carry both her children off the plane at one point during the hijacking. But she was not able to manage both her 4-year-old autistic son and her 18-month-old baby. Faced with a ``Sophie's Choice,'' the woman tossed the 18-month-old child off the plane and stayed aboard with the 4-year-old, Moore said, tears welling in her eyes. Moore, who works with special education children in Bakersfield, had been talking to the woman quite a bit.

Although Moore was never 100 percent clear on the hijackers' demands, she disagreed with Indian officials giving into the terrorists.

``I'm very concerned about that. I always believed that people shouldn't be reinforced positively for bad behavior,'' she said.

Moore said she wants to return to India some day - although she knows her family will be worried sick.

Salas smiled at the thought and said she wants to keep her mom close and safe, but it would ``hurt her heart'' to prevent her mother from traveling because it brings her such joy, she said.

And because she does travel a lot, the family often worries about run-ins with terrorists, Twisselman said. But when news of the hijacking first broke, Twisselman said the family wasn't sure whether the flight in question was the one her mother took.