Kandahar hijack, 1999: What happened with IC 814 and hostages for 7 days?

The huge crisis, which stretched to seven agonising days, became one of India’s darkest aviation hours. There were 191 people on board, including 15 crew members. The nation watched with bated breath as Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government tried to negotiate with the hijackers and rescue the passengers. For the passengers it was a journey to hell and back.

What really happened on that fateful aircraft for seven days or nearly 173 hours?

On Day 1: On December 24, at around 4 pm, all the passengers were seated aboard IC 814 with 11 crew members prepared for a routine flight, as it took off from Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu to Delhi airport.

At around 4.39 pm, the flight reached Indian airspace and in the cockpit Captain Devi Sharan was enjoying a cup of tea with his flight engineer Anil K Jaggia and steward Anil Sharma. Suddnely, an intruder barged in and pushed past him to enter the cockpit. Jaggia in his book IC 814 Hijacked: The Inside Story, wrote that the instant they caught a glimpse of the intruder, they knew they were in trouble.

Jaggia describes him: "His face was masked under a red balaclava and even his eyes behind the slit in the monkey-cap were hidden behind photochromatic lenses." The man held a grenade in his left hand and a revolver in his right.

The intruder warned them not to move or try to act smart as they had seized the aircraft. At 4.53 pm, the aircraft was in the hands of the hijackers.

Meanwhile, at 4.56 pm, the Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Delhi first received the disturbing information that the aircraft had been hijacked. This was largely thanks to Captain Sharan, who had quietly sending a coded message to the ATC unseen by the hijackers. The passengers were informed and naturally, even as some thought it was an "exercise" by the airlines, they soon found the hijack was for real.

Fuelling stops

There were five hijackers in all and they demanded that Captain Sharan fly the airplane to Kabul. The aircraft, however, was low on fuel and they ordered it to be refuelled at Lahore. However, the Pakistani authorities denied IC 814 the landing rights at Lahore airport, and the terrorists had no choice but to agree with the pilot's suggestion to land in Amritsar.

The flight reached Amritsat at 7 pm.

What happened in Amritsar?

At this point, there are many theories why the Indian government bungled the operation to rescue the passengers. Even as officials from different departments confabulated and as former Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) chief and Crisis Management Group member AS Dulat said in one report no definite solution was proposed as the plane was parked on the tarmac for 47 minutes.

According to Dulat, the home minister, principal secretary, NSA (National Security Adviser) visited the spot and nobody decided anything. In the end, the blame was laid at DGP Punjab (Sarabjit Singh)'s door for he had said ‘my Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal had told me I don’t want bloodshed in Amritsar. Let it pass if it has to pass’.

In 2015, former Punjab top cop KPS Gill had come out in support of Dulat's disclosure of the goof-ups in the handling of the hijacking. Pointing out that what transpired in Amritsar was avoidable, Gill said that he had rung up the then cabinet secretary Prabhat Kumar twice since he had past experience of handling two hijacking incidents in the same but he did not return his phone calls.

National Security Guards (NSG) should have been paratrooped from Manesar without waiting for a go-ahead from the Prime Minister's office for two hours and the Punjab police should not have allowed the IC184 to take off from Amritsar by switching off the runaway lights and by setting up blockades.

Even as Delhi dithered, the hijackers were getting nervous over the delay in refuelling the plane and ordered the pilot to fly out of Amritsar. It was 7.47 pm. The Indian government had missed a golden chance.

Meanwhile, the passengers were having a miserable time. The hijackers ordered the crew to remove the food that had been served, and separated the men from the women and children. They blindfolded them and threatened them with explosives if they did not cooperate.

The Lahore episode

The aircraft just had oneand a half minute of fuel left and the pilot was sure the plane would crash when it finally reached Lahore.

The runway lights at the Lahore airport were switched off, and the runway was closed. In a recent interview to the media after the release of the Netflix series on the Kandahar hijack as it is called, Sharan recalled that he braced himself for a crash landing. "Airport runway was closed. I didn’t have any choice. I didn’t have any fuel to go back to Amritsar. I had only one choice: to crash the plane,” he said.

The situation took a dramatic turn when Pakistani airport authorities gave the flight clearance to land just in time. The aircraft landed at Lahore at 8.01 pm.

“Permission to land was given only when the pilot informed ATC Lahore that he would be forced to crash-land the aircraft as fuel had got exhausted,” an external affairs minister’s statement said.

Destination Kabul, stopover Dubai

After refueling at the Lahore airport, at 10.32 pm, the plane took off for Kabul, Afghanistan.

However, with no night landing facilities in Kabul the aircraft headed for Dubai, landing in the emirate at 01.32 am on Christmas day, December 25.

Day 2, December 25: Death of a passenger

UAE authorities started a dialogue with the hijackers and 27 passengers were released. Meanwhile, when 10 passengers had been moved to the business class cabin of the aircraft, 25-year-old Ruben Katyal had been stabbed by one of the hijackers, Zahoor Mistry. His body was also handed over. Tragically, his wife who was still inside the aircraft was clueless that her newly-wed husband had died. He would be the lone fatality of this horrific hijacking.

The aircraft then took off at 6.20 am on December 25 and landed at the Kandahar airport in Afghanistan at 8.33 am. It stayed there for the next six days until the hijacking ended on December 31.

Day 3, December 26

The passengers were given meals on an irregular basis and they had limited access to toilet facilities. They were struggling to cope with their despair and fear as they had no idea how this hijack would end. Meanwhile, according to Neelesh Mishra, who wrote a book on the hijacking said all the hijackers assumed false names. That is how they referred to each other and how the passengers referred to them throughout the hijacking“Shankar” “Bhola” “Burger” “Doctor” and the “Chief”. Chief was the brother of the then-jailed Masood Azhar.

The controversy over the Netflix series giving Hindu names to the hijackers therefore had an explanation. In a statement on January 6, 2000, then Union home minister LK Advani unveiled the true names of the hijackers as Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayeed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim and Shakir. They were all from Pakistan, he said.

Advani said security forces got to know the names of the hijackers after the arrest of four ISI operatives in Mumbai, “who comprised the support cell for the five hijackers of the Indian Airlines Plane”.

The government identified Sunny Ahmed Qazi as “Chief”, Shakir as “Doctor”, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim as “Burger”, Shahid Akhtar Sayed as “Bhola” and Ibrahim Athar as “Shankar”. A ministry of external affairs statement also made it clear that to the hijacked plane passengers these hijackers came to be known respectively as Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola and Shankar.

Meanwhile, the Taliban army had surrounded the aircraft in .

Days 4 to 7,December 27 and 31

India was in a strange situation as it did not have diplomatic ties with Taliban. External affairs minister Jaswant Singh said he also reached out to countries in the region for help in diffusing the situation. Direct discussions between hijackers and Indian officials happened between December 27 and 31, with Singh going to Kandahar.

Despite the initial reluctance, the Indian government negotiated with the hijackers of IC 814, with the Taliban acting as mediators.

Initially, the hijackers demanded the release of 36 terrorists held in India, including Masood who later founded the Jaish-e-Mohammed — involved in the 2019 Pulwama attacks. They also asked for the coffin of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) leader Sajad Afghani and US$ 200 million. India finally agreed to release Masood Azhar along with Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, all then affiliated with terror group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.

Meanwhile, inside the plane, a merchant navy captain Kollatu Ravikumar, who was a hostage on the plane, later recalled how the exhausted hostages would catch a few hours of sleep in the wee hours of the morning. "The usual Afghan bread was served for breakfast. I did not feel like eating. I was worried that the millennium would end in hours and I would be missing the celebrations. I was thinking of many things,” remembered Ravikumar.

December 31

The 151 hostages were finally freed and they were flown to Delhi via two special flights. When Indian officials entered the aircraft the passengers were in a bedraggled state and there was a strong smell of urine and faeces.

The hijacked aircraft returned to New Delhi on January 1, 2000.

Bloody disgrace

The current National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, who was then the Intelligence Bureau chief, oversaw the handover and release of passengers. He called the entire episode a "bloody disgrace" for India.

While the MEA's statement on this dark hour of Indian history reads: "The hijack crisis, and its well-established nexus with Pakistan's continuing proxy war against India, has sharply highlighted the inseparable link between India's internal security, the security of our borders and the protection of out unity and integrity."

Taliban provided safe passage for the terrorists to Pakistan. Masood Azhar went on to start the notorious terror outfit, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, which has carried out several attacks on Indian soil killing hundreds, including the Parliament attacks in 2001, the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, and the 2019 Pulwama attack.