Gunmen who hijacked a ferry in support of Chechen rebels surrendered Friday to Turkish authorities and were taken ashore, the ship's captain said in a marine radio broadcast with naval officials.
"They've all left," said the captain of the Black Sea ferry, according to the broadcast monitored aboard the Haci Baba I fishing vessel on the scene.The captain said the pro-Chechen gunmen, about seven or eight mainly ethnic Turks, left the ferry aboard rubber dinghies.
"So is the ship all clear?" asked the naval officer.
"Yes, all clear," said the captain.
Earlier, the gunmen, who hijacked the ferry Tuesday in the Black Sea port of Trabzon with about 200 hostages, had said they were preparing to surrender and naval authorities ordered all vessels to clear the area.
"From our point of view we hit our target," one of the gunmen, speaking by cellular telephone, told the private ATV television minutes before the surrender.
Witnesses earlier said a medical team moved in just hours after the 3,838-ton Avrasya vessel anchored just outside the Bosphorus strait Friday morning after the hijackers heeded a Turkish warning not to enter the strategic Bosphorus waterway.
Anatolian news agency later said a total of eight people were evacuated, five Turks and three Russians, in three shifts.
One of the hostages evacuated told Turkish television from a hospital clinic that conditions were good on board the ferry and the passengers were being treated well by their captors.
Meanwhile, Russian President Boris Yeltsin on Friday defended the massive Russian assault on Pervomayskaya to crush Chechen hostage-takers, saying "mad dogs" must be stopped.
Yeltsin told a news conference in Moscow that the order to wipe out the guerrillas on Thursday "was the right decision."
The media may have attacked the government assault, but Moscow had no choice, he said: "Mad dogs must be shot down."
Reporters were expelled from Pervomayskaya and neighboring Sovetskoye on Tuesday, and the two villages remained sealed off Friday.
Yeltsin said Thursday that 82 of 100 hostages survived the offensive that turned Pervomayskaya into a wasteland of cinders and corpses sprawled in snowy ditches.
Eighteen hostages were still missing after a weeklong standoff but "must be presumed alive," he said. He has said variously that all or most of the rebels were killed.
Government troops searched the ruins of the devastated hamlet Friday looking for rebels who may have escaped the assault.
An aide to Chechnya's Russian-backed leader Doku Zavgayev said the Chechen band's commander, Salman Raduyev, had escaped to Chechnya. His exact whereabouts were not publicly known.
Yeltsin told the Kremlin news conference Friday that 27 soldiers died in the assault and 180 Chechen rebels had been killed.
The figures did not mesh with numbers he gave earlier to leaders of former Soviet republics meeting Friday in Moscow.
In Washington, President Clinton said he hopes Russia finds a political solution to the conflict in Chechnya, but said the United States must give Moscow "a wide berth" in dealing with the rebellious republic.
"What I hope is that they'll find a political solution ultimately for the problems of Chechnya. I think it's going to be difficult if they have to rely on a whole military solution," Clinton said in an interview with U.S. News & World Report.
As for the latest crisis, Clinton added: "That's different from how they should react to a specific terrorist incident. We don't make judgments about that. I wasn't there. I don't know, and I think we have to give them a wide berth on that."