At least five hostages and a hijacker were killed early Friday morning during a botched rescue by police special units in southern Russia.


The Interior Ministry reported late Friday that four women were killed in the town of Mineralniye Vody when one of the hijackers detonated a grenade inside a helicopter to repel the police raid, and a fifth, an 18-year-old woman, died of wounds on the way to the hospital, Interfax reported.


Karl Smolikov, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry, said one hijacker died in the hospital from his wounds.


A total of 19 people were injured in the exchange, including the other three hijackers, who were captured, and six members of the special Omon police force, Smolikov said. He added that there had been shooting but insisted that all the deaths and injuries had been caused by the explosion.


The remainder of the 41 persons, originally taken hostage on a bus, were released.


The drama in Mineralniye Vody started Thursday afternoon when four hijackers, armed with four pistols and five hand grenades, took the passengers hostage and demanded $15 million and two getaway helicopters. No ransom was paid, Smolikov said.


In two recent hijackings in the same region, all the hostages were released safely as authorities handed over a ransom and let the kidnappers get away, arresting them only when they landed in the nearby breakaway region of Chechnya.


The hijackers were again about to flee to Chechnya in a helicopter with about ten hostages and three crew on board when Omon troops stormed the aircraft.


Reuters quoted a Federal Counterintelligence official as saying: "One of the bandits got suspicious as" police "boarded the helicopter and detonated the grenade. He was very nervous, probably he was on drugs."Itar-Tass reported that the hijackers had demanded a meeting with an assistant prosecutor in nearby Stavropol. Three Chechens went on trial Wednesday for a similar hijacking in May, and Itar-Tass quoted unnamed officials as saying the hijackers were related to some of the defendants and may have been trying to secure their release.


Deputy Public Prosecutor Oleg Gaidanov told a press conference Friday that his office was investigating possible connections between the three latest hijackings over the last 12 weeks in and around Mineralniye Vody.


Gaidanov said his office would also investigate the Omon attack on the helicopter, but added that "so far we see no violations of standard procedure."


It was not clear why the helicopter was stormed by the Omon instead of the Alpha Group, a highly trained special unit in the presidential guards that released hostages in several hijackings and helped storm the White House in last year's October rebellion.


In 1988, several hijackers and hostages were killed during a similarly bungled police raid in Leningrad. The Alpha Group arrived only minutes after the fatal shootout.


Mineralniye Vody was one of a series of towns and cities listed in a recent presidential decree that were supposed to get special attention in the government's highly publicized war on crime. But Gaidanov had little evidence of any attempt by the government to improve safety there, other than plans to beef up the local police force.


Yeltsin's decree on crime was signed June 14. It has been sharply criticized by members of the Duma and by human rights groups.


Gaidanov said that six formal complaints had been lodged at the prosecutor's office since the decree took effect but all were judged groundless. "The law has not been broken," he added.


He said that police had used a clause in the decree allowing arrests without charge for up to 30 days to arrest dozens of members of organized crime gangs. In Vladivostok for instance, police had arrested 18 alleged members of a gang suspected of carrying out at least 20 contract killings.


Gaidanov said that over 16,000 people were killed in premeditated murders in the first half of this year, up 12 percent from the same period last year and up 250 percent from five years ago.


He added that the prosecutor's office had asked Yeltsin to restrict releases on bail by allowing prosecutors to appeal. Over 2,000 criminal cases were dropped in 1993 because suspects who were released on bail disappeared, he said.