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A new Netflix series follows the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight in December 1999, which took seven days to investigate, making it the longest hijacking in Indian aviation history.
From the book Escape into fear by Captain Devi Sharan, the pilot on board the hijacked flight, IC814: The Hijacking of Kandahar examines the crisis from different perspectives – from the perspective of politicians and bureaucrats in Delhi’s war zone to that of the frightened hostages on board.
Five masked men hijacked the plane on December 24, 1999, 40 minutes after it took off from Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, bound for New Delhi.
Sharan was forced to fly the plane into Pakistani airspace, where he was denied permission to land despite repeated requests from the Indian High Commission in Pakistan. The plane landed in Amritsar shortly before 7 p.m., with barely enough fuel to last for 10 minutes.
In Amritsar, the Indian authorities were instructed to delay refueling the plane as long as possible. At the same time, the hijackers wanted to get the plane back in the air and obtain permission to land in Pakistan.
“Please get permission to land at OPLA (Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore) … otherwise they are ready to crash anywhere … they have already selected 10 people they will kill,” Sharan told Indian air traffic control, according to India today.
Chaos broke out when he contacted air traffic control again and informed them that the hijackers had started killing hostages. Shortly afterwards, at 7:50 p.m., he took off.
“We are all dying,” he told the ATC.
The hijackers forced Sharan to fly the plane to Lahore, where the pilot, despite lacking permission from Pakistani air traffic control, made a desperate landing that turned off all lights and navigation aids at the airport.
After refueling, the plane took off again from Lahore and attempted to land in Dubai. After being denied permission there too, the flight landed at Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. Here, the hijackers released 27 of the 176 passengers, including the body of 25-year-old Rupin Katyal, who had been stabbed to death by the hijackers.
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The plane then finally landed at the hijackers’ original destination, the Taliban-controlled Afghan airport in Kandahar.
The remaining hostages waited here for the next six days while the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee negotiated with the terrorists, who demanded that India release 36 prisoners in exchange for the hostages.
The five Pakistani hijackers were identified as Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim and Shakir and belonged to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), an Islamist terrorist group based in Pakistan.
Their demands were simple: they wanted the release of HuM members Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Masood Azhar, as well as Pakistan-backed Kashmiri militant Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar.
After intensive negotiations and internal hand-wringing, the Indian government succeeded on December 30 in convincing the kidnappers to release all of the three terrorists’ hostages.
“I must have fallen asleep around 3 a.m. I woke up at 8 a.m. For breakfast I had the usual Afghan bread. I had no appetite. I was afraid that the millennium would end in a few hours and I would miss the celebrations. I was thinking about many things,” said the report of 41-year-old merchant marine captain Kollattu Ravikumar, one of the hostages on the flight.
All three released terrorists have since been implicated in terrorist attacks, including the attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi in 2001, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, the kidnapping and murder of The Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.
After the hostages were released, Indian authorities expected Taliban officials to arrest the kidnappers and take the released terrorists into custody. Instead, the Taliban drove them across the border toward Quetta in Pakistan.
The BJP government faced heavy criticism for not resolving the crisis earlier and particularly for allowing the flight to leave Indian territory.
AK Doval, the 64-year-old former intelligence chief who led the four-member negotiating team to Kandahar, described the incident as a “diplomatic failure” and a “bloody disgrace” for India.
“Our diplomatic failure was due to our incompetence. We knew that the US was totally against the terrorists, that it was against the Taliban and that it had the UAE completely under its control. We could not take advantage of that. Our ambassador could not even enter the airport (in Abu Dhabi),” he told the Press Trust of India news agency.
The series has an ensemble cast and was created by Anubhav Sinha and Trishant Srivastava.
“Trishant, the author, and I dug into the subject because we thought most of the information was available online. Documentaries and vlogs were being made, articles were being written, so we wanted to dig deeper into the subject to get a juicier bite,” Sinha said. diversity.
“We met officials leading the rescue mission from Delhi and passengers and crew told us the story on the plane. Adrian Levy, a well-known journalist, author and filmmaker from London, came on board and a whole new international canvas unfolded before us.
“What happened in those seven days turned out to be a gripping story, through scary and thrilling tactical and diplomatic maneuvers that needed to be told. Audiences need to know inside and out this story that has never been told before, with a cast that I don’t know if I can put together again.”
IC 814: The Hijacking of Kandahar will be available to stream on Netflix starting August 29th.
