Black Sea hostage crisis
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Black_Sea_hostage_crisis".

This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling. You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available. (July 2008)

The Black Sea hostage crisis took place in the four days of January 1996 on the Black Sea during the First Chechen War. The hostage crisis ended without bloodshed after three days with the safe release of the over 219 captives unharmed while 13 were hospitalized from illness and injuries.

Hijacking

The Panamanian-registered ferry Avrazya was captured on January 16, 1996, by an international armed group in support of the Chechen rebels besieged by the Russian forces at Pervomayskoye. The vessel was about to leave for Sochi, Russia in Trabzon, Turkey with 177 passengers and 55 crew members onboard when the nine militants shot the port security supervisor in the foot and changed the route to Istanbul.

The militants (later revealed to be six Turks of Caucasian origin, two Chechens and an ethnic Abkhaz from Georgia) said they were planning a spectacular destruction of the emptied ship in order to draw attention to Chechnya's plight. However, they also threatened to blow it up together with the separated 114 Russian hostages if the Russian forces did not halt their offensive against the Kizlyar hostage-takers.

Turkish authorities, ignoring Russian demands that they act more forcefully,^[1] coped with the hijackers, avoiding bloodshed and liberating all hostages through the constant communication and negotiations with the captors. The ship arrived at the north entrance of Bosphorus on January 19, 1996, around 12:00 hours. At 17:00 hours the same day, four of the militants surrendered to the authorities after throwing their guns and bombs into the sea. The remaining members of the group tried to hide in the passenger crowd without success.

Aftermath

The five Turkish gunmen, Muhammed Tokcan (b. 1969 Gebze), Tuncer Özcan (b. 1968 Düzce), Sedat Temiz, Erdinç Tekir (b. 1966 Istanbul), Ertan Coşkun (b. 1960 Zonguldak), Ceyhan Mollamehmetoğlu, ethnic Abkhaz Roki Gitsba (b. 1971) and the two Chechens Ramazan Zubareyev (b. 1963) and Viskhan Abdurrahmanov (b. 1967) were sentenced on March 7, 1997, to more than eight years in prison.^[2] Abdurrahmanov escaped on October 4 from the State Hospital in Bursa. On October 21, it has been detected that the convicts Zubaroyev, Gitsba and Özkan also broke out; Gitsba has been later reportedly shot dead when he was getting out of the mosque in Gudauta, Abkhazia on August 17, 2007.^[3]

The leader of the militants, Muhammed Tokcan, escaped from the prison in Dalaman on October 6, 1997. Tokcan was arrested again at the Atatürk Airport in Istanbul on April 29, 1999, as he tried to flee to Sochi with a false passport. He was paroled on December 22, 2000.^[4] On April 22, 2001, just before midnight, a group of 12 militants led by paroled Tokcan seized the Swissotel in Istanbul and took hostages to draw attention to the the new war in Chechnya. The crisis ended after 12 hours without bloodshed when all gunmen surrendered.^[5][6]

References

External links

• Pro-Chechen Ferry Hijackers Surrender to Turks, The New York Times, January 20, 1996
• Chechen rebels' hostage history, BBC News, 1 September, 2004