Turkish commandos killed a lone hijacker, identified as a Kurdish militant armed with a bomb, in a pre-dawn operation on Saturday to rescue more than 20 passengers and crew held hostage for 12 hours on a high-speed ferry near Istanbul. Hostages aboard the Kartepe ferry later described how the hijacker was shot dead minutes after the commandos slipped aboard. "There was no chance left we'd capture him alive.
The long phone calls to persuade him (to surrender) failed," Interior Minister Idris Sahin told NTV news channel, adding that 450 grammes of plastic explosive were found on the body. None of the 18 passengers or six crew were hurt, but some were taken to a hospital for checks after their ordeal. The Interior Minister identified the dead hijacker as Mensur Guzel, saying he was a member of "the terrorist organisation" - a reference to the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
Guzel, according to the minister, was born 1984 in Diyarbakir, the south-eastern city at the heart of the Kurdish separatist insurgency, but had been living in western province of Kocaeli, where the ferry set sail from. Three people connected with the dead man had been detained, Sahin said.
Officials had described the man as carrying a device with cables with a switch. Before the minister confirmed explosives were found, the provincial governor of Kocaeli had said it was a fake bomb. Since Friday evening, coastguard vessels with commandos aboard had tracked the "sea bus" in the Sea of Marmara before it ran low on fuel and dropped anchor.
Shortly before 5.00 am (0300 GMT) a flurry of activity was evident on the ferry's main deck. Hazy television pictures showed figures moving in the aisle between rows of empty seats. A few people were apparently wearing life jackets. There was no official word on how the commandos boarded the ferry, but news channels spoke with hostages as they left a police station in the town of Silivri where they had given their accounts of the hijacking.