PRO CHECHEN hijackers of a ferry sailing in the Black Sea are expected to surrender near Istanbul, the Turkish Interior Minister, Mr Teoman Unusan said early today.
Another report said that the leader of the hijackers had agreed to a Turkish demand not to enter the strategic Bosphorus strait.
"There seems to be a positive attitude in their talks with us. I think they will surrender near the entrance of the Bosphorus," Mr Unusan told the state television TRT.
Earlier Mr Unusan vowed not to let the Avrasya ferry, seized on Tuesday by gunmen supporting separatist Chechen rebels, into the strait.
The hijackers seized the ferry and some 200 passengers in the eastern port of Trabzon, and threatened to blow it up in the Bosphorus, which bisects Istanbul, unless Russia halted an attack on Chechen fighters in the village in Dagestan and allowed them to return to Chechnya.
In Moscow, Russian authorities said the bodies of 153 Chechen rebels had been found in the village of Pervomaiskoye after a four day battle that ended yesterday.
Interfax news agency said 82 of the hostages taken by the rebels last week had been freed, but did not say how many were killed.
Russia said it had ended the withering artillery assault against a band of vastly outgunned Chechen rebels but some of the guerrillas were reported to have escaped and taken captives with them.
Announcing the end of the assault, the latest violent chapter in Russia's 13 month old intervention in the secessionist republic of Chechnya, President Boris Yeltsin defended the attack as unfortunate but necessary and warned of further strikes to crush the Chechen independence movement.
Mr Yeltsin, citing a report from the Federal Security Service (FSB) chief, Mr Mikhail Barsukov, said 82 hostages had been freed but 18 were still missing.
Mr Yeltsin said search groups would look for them in the area around Pervomaiskaya, a now devastated village in Dagestan near the border with Chechnya.
The four day operation against the village, during which Russian forces pounded the rebels relentlessly with helicopter gun ships, multiple rocket launchers and tanks, was "completed with minimal losses" among the hostages and federal forces, Mr Yeltsin said.
Mr Yeltsin promised to strike at Chechen rebel strongholds in areas where no civilians were living, to halt "terrorism" on Russian soil. The assault was yet another political gamble for Mr Yeltsin, who faces presidential voting in June and had already come in for widespread criticism in Russia and abroad over his handling of the Chechnya situation.
A Russian interior ministry spokesman quoted by Interfax news agency said the 18 missing hostages were ministry policemen captured by the rebels when they entered Pervomaiskaya on January 10th.
Before the Russian assault began early on Monday there were some 150 rebels in the village holding more than 100 hostages, most of them civilians.
Speaking in a hospital in Aksai, 15 km from Pervomaiskaya, an ex hostage, Mr Andrei Stepanenko (25), said that at 3 a.m. yesterday a group of rebels with about 20 hostages broke through the Russian lines.
He said some wounded hostages who left with the rebels were carried on stretchers.