A hijacker, an air stewardess and a Turkish passenger died yesterday at the end of a two-day hostage crisis when Saudi special forces stormed a Russian plane commandeered by armed Chechens to the city of Medina.
Saudi state-run television showed about a dozen commandos, pistols drawn, scrambling up ladders and breaking through the cockpit window and doors.
At least two hijackers were shown pinned face down on the tarmac under the boots of commandos in bullet-proof vests. The television cut to footage of dozens of drawn-looking passengers flooding from the chartered Tupolev-156 down landing steps to freedom.
"The raid ended in the death of a hijacker and one passenger as well as a woman killed by one of the hijackers," an Interior Ministry spokesman said.
"One of the hijackers killed the air stewardess when the special forces raided the plane. The special forces retaliated and killed the hijacker," a high-ranking Saudi official said.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said the stewardess was killed by the hijackers, who slit her throat with a knife. She was named as Ms Yulia Fomina, from Moscow, born in 1973.
In Ankara, Turkish officials named the dead passenger as a Turkish building worker, Mr Gursel Kambal (27).
"Another woman and a passenger were wounded," the Saudi spokesman said. However, Kremlin officials said five others were wounded, four Turks and a Russian.
The assault came following "an agreement between Saudi and Russian authorities after negotiations [with the hijackers] reached an impasse," the Saudi spokesman said. "The hijackers threatened to blow up the plane."
Despite reports in Moscow of a shoot-out, a Saudi official said the three Chechens were armed only with a knife, a pick and what appeared to be a bomb.
The order for the assault came shortly after the Saudi authorities pretended to refuel the vessel for a long flight in response to demands from the hijackers. Saudi and Russian officials said the hijackers had freed overnight or allowed to escape about 50 hostages out of the 162 passengers and 12 crew aboard the flight from Istanbul to Moscow.
President Putin flew back to Moscow from a skiing holiday in Siberia after the assault as Moscow immediately called for the hijackers, who had demanded an end to Russian actions in Chechnya, to be handed over.
The crisis came as an embarrassment for the Russian leader, who built his popularity by launching the war in Chechnya, where Russia sent troops nearly 18 months ago to re-establish its rule.
A Russian security official in charge of a hijack crisis unit said negotiations with Saudi authorities for the hostage-takers to be sent to Moscow for trial were under way.
Mr Mairbek Vachagayev, a spokesman for the breakaway Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, yesterday repeated denials that pro-independence rebels were involved in the hijacking. It was "the act of one individual and the Chechen leadership bears no responsibility for it", he said.
A Chechen source in Jordan said the former Chechen security minister, Mr Aslanbek Arsayev, was one of the three hijackers. The other two were his brother, Mr Supian Arsayev, and Supian's son. Other Chechnyan sources, however, said Mr Arsayev was not involved in the hijacking.