Airliners shuttled hundreds of trapped foreigners out of the Cote d'Ivoire yesterday as South Africa convened urgent peace talks on a crisis that it said threatened to destabilize West Africa.

　　Residents in Abidjan, the commercial capital, meanwhile, stared hopelessly at the burned-out wreckage of their shops and offices as a measure of calm returned to the city after five days of anti-foreigner mob violence.

　　France and other nations launched the evacuations on Wednesday.

　　Convoys sent out by the US Embassy and other nations gathered foreigners from their homes while French soldiers in boats plucked some trapped citizens from the banks of Abidjan's lagoons.

　　A French official has said between 4,000 to 8,000 of its 14,000 citizens wanted to leave, a number that alone would make it one of the largest evacuations of Africa's post-independence era.

　　South African Foreign Affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa said President Thabo Mbeki would open the talks later yesterday in Pretoria, South Africa.

　　Ivorian rebel and opposition leaders, including former Prime Minister Alassane Outtara, were expected to participate, South African Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad said.

　　The violence began on Saturday when Cote d'Ivoire warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker in an airstrike on the rebel-held north in three days of government air attacks that violated a more than year-old cease-fire in the country's civil war.

　　France wiped out the nation's newly built-up air force on the tarmac within hours.

　　Including the airstrike, the turmoil since Saturday has claimed at least 27 lives and wounded more than 1,000. The toll, likely incomplete, includes the 10 victims of the airstrikes, five loyalists whose bodies were shown on state TV, and 11 loyalists and one Ivorian security force member treated by hospitals on Monday and Tuesday.

　　Yesterday, Abidjan awoke to the first calm day since Saturday. Some shops were open and traffic returned to streets being cleared of charred vehicles and roadblocks of tires. Residents crowded supermarkets and waited in long lines to draw cash from ATMs.

　　The first of several hundred evacuees arrived in France late on Wednesday night.

　　Some 270 more people left for Paris yesterday morning, and 510 more were due to leave in the afternoon on an Air France jumbo jet, a French official said.

　　A Spanish military plane evacuated 92 people and was going back for more, officials in Madrid said yesterday. They included 44 Spaniards, 22 French citizens, 10 Portuguese and a variety of people of other nationalities, the Spanish Foreign Ministry said. At the request of the United States, Spain will also evacuate at least 90 Americans, Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said.

　　About 20 Americans landed on Wednesday night in Ghana, on a Canadian-organized evacuation flight.

　　The Netherlands sent a military plane to collect 50 of its nationals late on Wednesday, while more than 100 British troops in Ghana were placed on standby for a possible rescue operation.

　　Evacuees also included some UN employees and others among 1,500 expatriates holed up at UN offices around Abidjan. More than 1,600 others - most of them French, but also citizens of 42 other countries - had taken refuge inside a French military camp.

　　Elsewhere, more than 4,000 inmates of Cote d'Ivoire's largest penitentiary escaped through the sewers amid massive political violence and are believed hiding out in a forest in the middle of Abidjan, officials said yesterday.

　　Prisoners wrested off a manhole cover and made their way out.

　　(The Associated Press)