Just before it started to get dark, a convoy of coaches with police escorts slid out of the hotel car park and headed to a nearyby fire station. They were then due to be taken later last night to a Home Office 'immigration reception centre'in the Gloucestershire village of Moreton-in-Marsh.
The 74 hostages took with them their luggage: piles of cheap holdalls and tightly-tied plastic bags. They left behind them the Hilton's Living Well Health Club, Amy's Restaurant, the Café Cino, the heated pool, the £202 a night rooms and the stinking, useless, unflyable shell of an old Boeing 727.
Sitting behind the glinting windows of their coaches, they showed little emotion, except for the odd diffident smile, a repeatedly stroked beard or the classic nervous Afghan gesture of readjusting the pattu (an all-purpose blanket) over their shoulders. Above all they looked bemused and bewildered; exactly like people who, having set off on a short journey within their own country, suddenly find themselves transported to what might as well be another planet. They did not look like the first wave of the invasion of the bearded benefit snatchers.
They did not look like Middle England's worst nightmare, because they're not. When they took off from their home city last Sunday, none - even the hijackers - thought they would end up in London. The idea that the UK was targeted as a 'soft touch' is just one of the various myths that sprang up, amid the bluster and the bile, last week.
The truth is - like the average room at the 'luxury hotel' where the freed hostages have supposedly been enjoying the 'high life' - actually rather uncomfortable. Most Afghans have only a fairly hazy idea of where Britain is. They certainly don't have a profound understanding of its asylum regulations. If Britain is known for anything in Afghanistan, it is for the repeated military defeats it suffered there during the nineteenth century 'Great Game', for the help it offered the Afghan guerrilla fighters who fought the Soviet occupation of their country in the Eighties and, most recently, for supporting United Nations sanctions which, in an attempt to punish the ruling Taliban regime protecting the terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, have merely made a hard life harder for most average Afghans.
Even the hijackers appear to have had little idea of their destination when, five minutes out of Kabul airport last Sunday morning, they took control of the plane. Intelligence in sources in Pakistan told The Observer that the hijackers' first demand to the pilot, Captain Sayed Nabi, and his crew was merely to fly them out of Afghan airspace. Once they had crossed the line of Amu Darya river into central Asia, the hijackers asked him to get meteorological reports for a whole range of Asian destinations.
Only when the plane left Moscow did it seem that London, Frankfurt and Paris were possible goals. Quite why the British capital was the preference is unclear. It may have been simply because at least all the hijackers had heard of it. There are gaudily-coloured pictures of the Thames and, oddly, the the Tyne, plastered to the walls of half the restaurants in their home city.
Yesterday the plane's flight crew spoke in public for the first time of their ordeal.
Captain Nabi told reporters how the kidnappers had brandished a pistol in his face. 'I just said, "We will follow whatever you command",' he remembered.
Nabi said the worst moment came when the plane landed at Stansted to be surrounded by security personnel. 'The hijackers were very nervous, and were shouting that they would blow us up,' he said. The crew had no plan to escape at first, but later fled the plane so that the hijackers would be stranded and forced to surrender.
The debate is now over what is to be done with the 164 Afghans who arrived last Sunday. Twenty-two people have been arrested and are being kept in the cells of various Essex police stations. They are likely to be charged tomorrow at local magistrates' courts, and taken on to be concentrated at Belmarsh high security prison in south-east London.
Thirty-seven others are being taken to the RAF base at Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, from where a specially-chartered Kampuchean Airlines TriStar will take them back to Kandahar, a city in southern Afghanistan which is a 30-hour, 300 mile drive from the capital, Kabul. Thirty of the former hostages seemed undecided about what to do. Several were still being interviewed by police yesterday.
The fate of the asylum seekers depends on whether they can convince the Government that returning them to Afghanistan will mean their deaths, torture, imprisonment or harassment.
With the hijackers, the case is clear. The Taliban said last Friday that they will be tried according to Islamic law and executed if found guilty. The sentence would almost certainly be carried out in the Kabul football stadium with a machine gun after the weekly Friday prayers.
But the fate of the ordinary passengers, who it appears had no part in the hijack, is less easy to determine.
The Observer has obtained the plane's passenger list, and sources in Afghanistan and among the official interpreters at Stansted confirm that many of the names are those of relatively wealthy, middle-class Kabul residents. At least one is a medicines trader, others are low-level government officials. All were themselves rich enough, in Afghan terms, to afford the £12.50 fare (five months' pay for a teacher) for the flight to Mazar-E-Sharif. The hijackers too, sources say, are educated and from good backgrounds.
However, it is unlikely that, if they were sent home, the hostages would suffer at the hands of the Taliban. They would not, as some activists have claimed, be seen as 'enemies of Islam'. The Taliban are sensitive to world opinion.
Afghanistan has received little attention in recent years. One Afghan interpreter at Stansted reiterated a complaint often heard in his homeland. 'We had our country ruined in the war against the Soviets but when the Cold War was over, the West just let us drop,' he said. 'We have received nothing to help us get back on our feet.'
As they emerged from the hotel yesterday, the hostages all looked up at the sky. After a week of uncertainty and gruelling incarceration it was perhaps not surprising that - with its cold, blue clarity - it looked a little like the limitless expanses that arc over the deserts and mountains, battered cities, mine-strewn fields and deep, blue lakes of their distant homeland.
