USSR Anti-hijacking Law Decreed Two Years After Leningrad Trial

The Soviet Union’s first anti-hijacking law, decreed yesterday by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, writes into the USSR’s penal code penalties imposed two years ago on nine Jews accused of attempting to hijack a Soviet airliner in Leningrad to fly to Israel.

The stiff penalties announced in Moscow include the death sentence in cases where a hijacking leads to death or serious injury and basic sentences of 3-10 years and up to 15 years – the maximum Soviet prison term – if violence is threatened or an accident is caused. The new law applies to the hijackers of Soviet planes and to hijackers who land non-Soviet planes on Soviet soil.

At the Leningrad hijack trial of Dec. 1970 in which the defendants were accused only of attempting to hijack a plane and in which no deaths or injuries occurred, death sentences were imposed on Edouard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshitz, four others received 10 year terms each, one a 12-year term, one eight years and one a four-year term. Kuznetsov and Dymshitz had their sentences commuted to 15 years’ imprisonment each after a world-wide outcry against the severity of the original sentences.

There have been no Soviet hijacking cases recently and Soviet airports have not adopted security measures comparable to those in Western countries. There are no searches of baggage and passengers. Observers here, speculating as to why the tough new penalties were published at this time, noted that the announcement of the hijack penalties coincided with efforts to obtain amnesty for Jewish political prisoners, the Leningrad defendants among them, in connection with the Soviet Union’s 50th anniversary observances.

(In New York, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, president of the American Jewish Congress, accused the Soviet Union today of “hypocrisy” in imposing stiff penalties for skyjacking at home while working to “undermine and scuttle” efforts to deter international air piracy through the United Nations Rabbi Hertzberg said, “If the Soviet government genuinely intends to help make civil aviation safe for innocent passengers, then let it cooperate in international efforts to punish and deter all acts of air hijacking without discrimination as to the political views or ideological commitments of those who carry them out.”)