A hijacked Afghan airliner was preparing to land at Standsted airport, near London, early this morning after a forced stop in Moscow.
The Afghan Ariana Boeing 727, hijacked from Kabul yesterday, left Moscow last night after a forced stop there before heading for western Europe.
The airliner, with around 170 passengers aboard, had already made stops in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and north-western Kazakhstan before flying on to Moscow.
Afghan Islamic Press, an independent news agency based in Pakistan, reported that six hijackers armed with pistols and grenades were demanding the release of Ismail Khan, a key opposition figure who had been in a Taleban jail since 1997.
He was detained by Afghanistan's ruling Islamic Taleban movement after it swept to power in 1996 on its way to controlling some 90 percent of the war-torn state. The anti-Taleban opposition alliance has denied any involvement in the hijacking, saying earlier that a dissident called Gula Ajha was responsible.
The airliner, belonging to Afghanistan's national carrier Ariana, touched down in Moscow at 9.41 p.m. (6.41 p.m. Irish time), a duty officer said. It had earlier made brief stopovers at the Kazakh city of Aktyubinsk and the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.
Interfax news agency reported that 181 portions of food and a refuelling had been requested at the airport.
It left Kabul in Afghanistan with 186 people on board, but 10 of the passengers were released in Tashkent and another three in Aktyubinsk.
Five men, four women and a girl, who looked about five years old, held a brief news conference in Tashkent to speak of their ordeal.
A second witness said he had seen a pistol, knife and grenade on one of the hijackers. They were not wearing masks and looked like normal passengers.
"It is a humanitarian tragedy," a Taliban foreign ministry spokesman, Mr Faiz Ahmad Faiz, said. "Those involved are the enemies of the Afghan people and the enemies of all humanity.
"We call upon the world to give us co-operation," he added.
The airliner took off from Kabul at 9:59 a.m. (0529 GMT) in clear weather heading for the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
But minutes later it went missing from the radar screens and after three hours landed at Tashkent. It then took off again for Moscow.
It was the second hijacking to hit Afghanistan in recent months. An Indian Airlines jet was hijacked in December as it left Kathmandu airport in Nepal.
On that occasion the Muslim militant hijackers flew to Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, where they held the jet for eight days before releasing their 160 hostages and escaping into the desert.
The British Home Office said the matter would only become its responsibility once the aircraft landed in Britain.
A spokeswoman said: "At this stage we do not even know if it will land in this country."