HIJACKERS `DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN,' CO-PILOT SAYS.

Byline: Tom Cohen Associated Press 

Boaters pulled corpse after corpse Sunday from the shattered, submerged fuselage of an Ethiopian airliner, commandeered by drunken hijackers who forced the pilot to fly until the jet ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean.

Only 52 people survived when the Boeing 767 cartwheeled into the waves off Comoros Islands on Saturday, killing 123. The survivors included two of the three hijackers, who struggled for the controls of the aircraft even as one engine and then the other ran dry and stopped.

The hijackers refused Capt. Leul Abate's pleas to let him land the jet safely at an airport in Moroni, the capital of the Comoros Islands.

``He wanted to go there, but they wouldn't let him,'' co-pilot Yonas Mekuria told The Associated Press from his hospital bed, where he was being treated for cuts and bruises.

``I guess they understood it,'' the co-pilot said of the fuel shortage. ``But they didn't give a damn.''

Tourists in bathing suits watched boat crews retrieve bodies Sunday from the broken jet rocking in the sapphire waves off the Comoros Islands, a small island chain between east Africa and Madagascar. Search crews covered the corpses in white sheets and ferried them to the palm-lined shore.

In what became the deadliest airplane hijacking ever, three men, believed to be Ethiopian, commandeered the flight shortly after it took off from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa on a flight to the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan, survivors said.

Armed with an ax, a fire extinguisher and a device they claimed was a bomb, the men demanded they be flown to Australia - but wouldn't let the pilot stop to refuel.

The men pushed flight attendants aside and stormed the cockpit, beating the co-pilot and forcing him out. As passengers listened in terror, they spewed threats over the jet's public address system.

``They said, `We escaped from prison. We are against the government. We are hijacking the plane. We have an explosive. If anybody moves, we'll explode it,' '' Ethiopian passenger Bisrat Alemu said.

One hijacker seemed drunk, and waved a bottle of whiskey that he'd apparently taken from a beverage cart on the plane, the co-pilot said.

For three hours, Abate guided the jetliner on his own and tried to reason with the hijackers, asking that he be allowed to land in the Seychelles or the Comoros Islands to refuel.

Finally, the pilot went on the public address system himself to announce that the jet was running out of fuel.

One engine had stopped, and the other would shortly, the pilot told the passengers. He was going to try to ditch the plane in the sea.

The hijackers fought the pilot for control of the aircraft in the last minutes aloft, the co-pilot said. ``They were interfering with procedures, grabbing at the instruments. They snatched the radio from the jack,'' he said.

``People were screaming,'' Bisrat said. ``Some were praying.''

``We knew we were going to land in the sea. We already knew that we were going to die,'' said N.B. Surti, a passenger from Bombay, India.

Survivors said a wing clipped the water. Then the body of the plane slammed into the sea, bouncing and flipping at least once before it broke apart.

``The first bump was really gentle. Then the second one was really hard,'' said passenger Frank Huddle, the U.S. consul-general in Bombay, India.

``The third one was even harder, like a 70-mph auto accident,'' he said. ``The last one was like an earthquake.''

Since the pilot had managed to bring the airliner down so close to shore, tourists and island residents were able to reach the survivors quickly. When Surti struggled out of the water filling the aircraft, rescuers already had surrounded the jet.

The tail of the airliner still rode above the waves Sunday, its bright Ethiopian Airlines emblem intact. Other parts of the plane sank beyond the reef a few hundred yards from shore.

Some bodies were thought to still be trapped in the sunken wreckage.

Authorities arrested the two hijackers who survived the crash. Other survivors included the pilot, hospitalized in the Comoros, and at least three of four Americans on board.

Foreign embassies and Ethiopian Airlines said the passenger list included people from Europe, Asia and Africa.

State-owned Ethiopian Airlines is one of Africa's oldest airlines. Boeing spokesman Brian Ames said the downed wide-body twin jet, a 767-200ER, was delivered to the airline around 1986.

The deadliest previous hijacking occurred in December 1977, when terrorists identified as the Japanese Red Army took over a Malaysian airlines jet en route to Kuala Lumpur. The plane crashed and all 100 people on board died.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1) Tourists paddle out to the broken fuselage of the Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed Saturday near shore in the Comoros Islands.

(2) Co-pilot Yonas Mekuria rests in the hospital in Moroni after surviving the watery crash.

Associated Press