[Poohbah]

OK, this is BS.

The Russians would have NO incentive to hold these people (one of them MIGHT escape, after all) for one nanosecond. Assuming the aircraft crashed on land, anyone alive at the crash site would have been dead before dawn.

[goodell70]

See Congressman McDonald's two-hour SUBVERSION FACTOR documentary video. Then you will understand: 1. How deception on this scale is not only possible, but to be expected; and, 2. Why the aircraft was shot down. Apart from that, the fact that the passengers were originally announced "safe" is a mere matter of record. Again, if you see THE SUBVERSION FACTOR, then you will understand why the Russians had to deceive everyone like this.

[A Little Bird]

The Russians would have NO incentive to hold these people (one of them MIGHT escape, after all) for one nanosecond. Assuming the aircraft crashed on land, anyone alive at the crash site would have been dead before dawn.

Why would the Soviets keep the KAL 007 passengers and crew alive instead of "killing off" the evidence against them?

The fate of the passengers and crew of KAL 007 needs to be viewed in the context of the Soviet Union's dealings generally with captured foreign nationals. There are the motives that are fairly well known to people that are knowledgeable about American POW/MIA issues:

1. The Soviets used captured foreigners as "bargaining chips" for western political concessions, western recognition of satellite regimes, and return of apprehended espionage agents.
2. The Soviets used captured foreigners for gaining (extorting) economic "credit" from the west.
3. Captured foreigners were used to supplement the slave labor work force for a failed economic approach - Communism.
4. Since the execution of KGB head Laventry Beria and his lieutenants - Colonel Kabulov, et al - in 1953, it had become clear that today's jailors and their supporters would be the jailed of tomorrow. Thus the fear of retribution diminished the practice of execution (as well as the most severe torments) among political prisoners.
5. Glastnost, and the opening of the books of the KGB and the Soviet repressive state system in general, would place the perpetuators of the killings of KAL 007 passengers and crew at great risk. This danger would inhibit their execution.
6. And finally, a still Biblically oriented America, a society still formed by the Christian concept of mercy may find it difficult to understand the Soviet-period-formed mentality that captured peoples are not simply to be "let go" to return to their homes or necessarily killed. They must be punished or required as conquored peoples to work it off - for life. This "working" is not so much for economic benefit to the conqueror but because the conquered have it coming to them and it is for the vindication of the victoroius.
   To illustrate - Secretary of State under President Truman, James F. Byrnes, was told in London in September of 1945 by Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Molotov (in reaction to the US's policy of simply demobilizing the Japanese Army and sending them home), "They [the Japanese] should be held as prisoners of war. We [the Allies] should do what the Red Army was doing with the Japanese it had taken in Manchuria [about 500,000] - make them work..."