IC 814 Hijacked

by Anil Jaggia

  “If you call me your father, then I can’t see my son without a jacket in the cold. You are wearing only a T-shirt underneath,” I pointed out.

  “You won’t listen, will you?” he cried, and catching me by the arm, he guided me into the airport car that was standing near the aircraft. He asked the driver of the vehicle to increase the heating inside to its maximum.

  Seated inside the car was the Afghan engineer who had opened the luggage hold. He asked me what was inside the bag that the hijackers had pulled out of the hold. “Special equipment, I’ve been told,” I replied. He seemed irritated at this: “They cheated me,” he said. “They told ATC that it contains medicine. I should not have opened the door.”

  I had been in the heated vehicle for about half an hour when Burger came back and asked me to return to the aircraft. As he led me to the aircraft, Burger kept a gun pointed at my head. I was puzzled. “What stuff are you made of?” I asked him. “You neither kill me, nor do you let me live!”

  Burger replied: “That was my duty. This is also my duty.”

  Strange thoughts, uncomfortable ones, crossed my mind. I thought of hijacks where the hijackers had shot passengers one by one. The PLO hijack of a British aircraft that they later blew up in Egypt was particularly chilling. I wondered whether I would ever see my family again. I acutely missed my daughters. I had promised them Christmas presents— now I wondered if I would ever be in a position to buy them one again. I shook my head: I wasn’t going to let such morbid thoughts get the better of me.

  My thoughts now went unbidden to the passengers in the aircraft. They too were alone, far from their families and homes, probably wondering what fate had brought them to this hostile country. My duty, as a member of the flight crew, lay in helping them. I knew I would do my utmost to ensure that the aircraft was not allowed to take off from Kandahar.

  So far, there had been no response from the Indian government. The Indian authorities had not been in touch with the hijackers, and they were getting restless. They had expected an instant reaction from the Indians, but this had not happened.

  The Taliban engineer passed on a bit of information that he must have had for some time now: the Indian government had asked for permission to fly two aircraft into Kandahar, but had been given clearance for only one that would probably come the following day. Tears welled up in my eyes. I rushed back into the aircraft and told Captain Sharan and Rajinder. “The Indians are coming. The Indians are coming.”

  * * *

  New Delhi

  De Mul had conveyed to the Indians that the hijackers were adamant, and that the talks had not yielded much. By now, many in India were beginning to doubt India’s Afghanistan policy that insisted on keeping all doors shut, and was now isolating itself further from the Taliban.

  Prime Minister Vajpayee called an emergency meeting of the Cabinet. Everyone agreed that something had to be done fast. The big question was: What? The three-hour-long meeting ended on a pessimistic note with the prospects of an early resolution of the ongoing hijack drama in Kandahar appearing bleak. Firebrand Trinamul Congress leader Mamata Banerjee volunteered to go to Kandahar and talk to the hijackers but her suggestion didn’t find favour. A military option was ruled out since there was almost no contact established within the Taliban leadership.

  Jaswant Singh told the media once more that “the safety and security of the passengers and the crew is of utmost importance”. Having mulled over the need of having an Indian representative in Kandahar, he spoke to the PM again and they decided that their representative should leave for Kandahar first thing in the morning from Islamabad.

  * * *

  5

  December 27, 1999

  WAITING

  FOR RELIEF

  The aircraft took off at 3.00 p.m. and, apart from a 13-member cockpit and cabin crew, also had two doctors and a nurse on board. Seven engineers and technicians were at hand to carry out any repairs on the hijacked A300 aircraft. The flight also carried food, water and medicines. However, what not many knew was that among the technicians and staff in the Airbus were 20 commandos of the Special Action Group trained in anti-hijacking.

  New Delhi

  External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh woke up, having mentally lived through the trauma of the 155 passengers still on board the aircraft, with almost every slot on most news channels and reams of newsprint devoted to the hijacking. He had hardly slept the previous night, monitoring information almost on a minute-to-minute basis. It was now more than 60 hours since IC 814 had been hijacked and no solution was in sight, given India’s limited contact with the Taliban. For Singh, this was his most critical crisis as a minister. To his mind, the briefing by his officials and the inputs from Islamabad and Washington indicated that the government may be left with no recourse but to talk directly with the Taliban. Faced with the prospect of making love to the enemy that may have been behind the hijacking only added to his woes. The Intelligence agencies had warned that the demand for the release of Masood Azhar belonging to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen may have been related to the fact that the Taliban regime had a close affinity with the militant group and helped them run training camps in their fight against India. The CIA provided New Delhi with considerable information from its own database on the Taliban and Kashmiri groups suspected to be behind the hijacking. Intelligence agencies in Britain, Israel and Canada were also providing help.

  The dossier on Masood Azhar had brought some light to bear on him and someone who might have to be called upon to influence him. While at Delhi’s Tihar jail, after he had been arrested in 1994, Masood Azhar had been close to none other than the notorious drug runner and ‘bikini-killer’, Charles Sobhraj, famed for his daring escape from that jail. Sobhraj was in Paris, and through a source, had now volunteered to help. Foreign Secretary Lalit Mansingh was informed and the Cabinet Secretariat was instructed to tap their man in Paris and get in touch with Sobhraj. Officials contacted Sobhraj who promised help, but his services were to remain unutilised.

  * * *

  On board IC 814

  By the next morning, the cockpit resembled an armoury. Strewn around were all kind of arms: revolvers, grenades and bullets. The place looked like an ammunition dump. The hijackers also had night vision binoculars which they referred to as “moonlight vision binoculars”. They could keep a watch over the passengers from one end of the aircraft to the other in darkness. I had gone to address a problem with the airconditioning, and was aghast at the spread of ammunition in the cockpit. Red Cap looked in control, but was clearly in a bad mood.

  “There is no further news from your government,” Red Cap said. “It doesn’t care for its people. It doesn’t care what happens here. It is not concerned about your condition. Such people should be taught a lesson so that in future they are careful.”

  I told him to conquer his temper. “Be patient,” I said.

  “How much more patient should I be?” he demanded.

  This much we knew: some dialogue had been initiated with the ATC by the UN team and some diplomats who had arrived the previous evening. Captain Sharan and I had been called into the cockpit. Red Cap had set a three-hour deadline for the governments of the foreign hostages to negotiate with him. He now wanted the Indians to talk to him, failing which he would present them with the bodies of two passengers as threatened earlier.

  The Afghans had encircled the aircraft with their commandos. A few of them were circling the aircraft in jeeps. Two tanks were visible in the distance. An HTV truck and two buses were parked in front of the aircraft. The sight of the commandos made the hijackers jittery. They kept opening the doors and looking at the rear of the aircraft repeatedly just as they had checked through the cockpit windows at Amritsar, Lahore and Al-Minhad.

  Red Cap asked ATC to have the commandos removed. He also asked Captain Sharan to convey his displeasure to ATC. ATC radioed back that they were there for their “hifaazat (protection)” and not to attack them. Red Cap said, “Never mind. Remove t
hem, we don’t want protection.”

  At this point, ATC Kandahar said: “What we are telling you is (a message) from the Corps Commander of Kandahar: You will not touch even one passenger. If you harm anybody, these commandos will storm the plane.” The UN team also communicated at this juncture that an Indian delegation was expected shordy.

  The hijackers seemed more upset with the authorities in Kandahar, and friendlier, as a result, towards us.

  Sharan and I were elated.

  * * *

  New Delhi

  The ordeal was no less harrowing for the relatives on the ground, left to face the trauma by a callous government. From the time they had gathered at Terminal II of the Indira Gandhi International Airport to receive their relatives, they had begun an anguished vigil at the airport as they waited for some information from the airline or the government, both of whom refused to oblige. Sporadic announcements about the location of the aircraft only served to heighten the suspense. The news that the aircraft had run out of fuel and that the hijackers were armed with bombs and pistols unnerved them.

  As no information on the passengers’ safety or the progress in the negotiations with the hijackers was forthcoming from the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the relatives decided they had had enough. They were losing patience with a wait that seemed to be endless, while their queries continued to remain unanswered. Their own conditions were nothing short of hellish. “It is worse than our biggest nightmare, and the government seems to be sleeping,” complained Sanjeev Chibber, a doctor who had six relatives on board the flight.

  The previous day, Chibber along with some other harried relatives, had stormed into a press conference being addressed by Jaswant Singh at the Press Information Bureau at Shastri Bhavan. The relatives relived their anguish and told a dumbfounded Singh that the government was not doing anything either about the hijacked flight, or in keeping them informed. They urged the minister to release the militants the hijackers wanted in lieu of their hostages. “Hasn’t the government released militants in exchange for the release of a Home Minister’s daughter earlier?” Chibber demanded. The reference was to Rubaiyya Sayeed, daughter of former Union Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed. A visibly embarrassed Jaswant Singh tried to pacify them even as the cameras zoomed and bytes rolled out. The relatives took centre stage: “Mr Minister, we voted for your party and brought you to power, and now you don’t even talk to us,” lashed out another relative. Singh was forced to concede that lack of communication from his side was responsible for the panic that the relatives were now feeling. He promised to share the progress on the state of affairs with them after the press conference. The media also insisted on being present. Singh later met the relatives in the MEA spokesperson’s room and assured them that the government was doing its best to seek an early end to the crisis. The irate relatives were still less than satisfied. For a media starved of photo-ops about the hijacking, the waiting relatives proved to be a Godsend, and their pictures were splashed across newspapers, magazines and on television screens, fanning the heat in the corridors of power.

  At a meeting held at Race Course Road, the PM’s crisis managers decided that the Prime Minister should meet some of the relatives so as to send out positive signals and take some pressure off the government. When the meeting took place, Vajpayee was in a poetic mood and said that they could have his head if the hostages were not returned safely. Once again, the PM merely turned the meeting into another political event, while the relatives remained annoyed at not being informed about developments in the situation in Kandahar.

  The relatives were so angry that later, even the news of the departure of the IA airbus to Kandahar with negotiators and doctors was treated with indifference and when the plane had to return due to a technical snag, “it was worse than a nightmare,” an IA official at the hotel said.

  On occasions, their ire was also directed at the media that manufactured images in order to sensationalise the hijack further.

  The government, meanwhile, tried to paint a rosy picture of the hostages on board to get the pressure off its back. Jaswant Singh declared that the passengers were comfortable, ignorant of the fact that those aboard were tormented hostages confined to a hellhole. Even the reports coming out of Kandahar, of the toilets in the aircraft being cleaned regularly, and of the passengers and crew being provided drinking water and food periodically, were belied by the harrowing tales of the released passengers.

  Taliban’s version of inflight catering seemed to consist of half an orange for vegetarians. Even statements that the passengers were playing cards and chess that were conveyed by the officials at the briefings turned out to be subsequently false.

  While the government continued to fumble, and tales of the apparent ‘safety’ and even ‘comfort’ of the hostages were fed to the relatives and media, Alka Ahuja, the wife of a Kargil martyr, met the PM and then the relatives and asked them to take a hardline stance in the national interest. Rumours did the rounds that the families of the martyrs who were being paraded with placards for the benefit of the media, were stage managed by the PM’s office.

  At the visitors lounge of IGI airport, the great Indian family spirit was on show. Away from the demonstrations and protests sat the Tolia family—20 of them—who had gathered from all over India after they had heard the news of the hijack of flight 814. Their loved Manjula Tolia was a passenger on board the aircraft. They waited amidst bouts of hope and despair, and occasional spells of cheer.

  * * *

  Kandahar

  On the morning of December 27, A.R. Ghanshyam, Commercial Counsellor with the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, was despatched to Kandahar. Ghanshyam arrived in Kandahar in a special UN plane. His brief was simple—to assess the situation on the ground and try to gauge the Taliban’s mind on the crisis. New Delhi wanted to be doubly sure the Taliban were not inclined to support the hijackers, on the basis of which it would decide its strategy. A.R. Ghanshyam met the Taliban leaders and among the first things he asked was for them to bring pressure on the hijackers to let the women and children go, and to help in bringing the hijacking to an end. The Taliban leaders heard him out, but said that they had nothing to do with the hijackers, and it was for India to negotiate with them.

  He had been given the cold shoulder.

  Ghanshyam went to the control tower to establish contact with the hijackers. Over the radio phone, he informed them that he had come to assess the situation and that New Delhi was examining their demands. The chief hijacker said his government was obviously not worried about the passengers, and had abandoned them to die. A stumped Ghanshyam was hard pressed to explain that the government was considering its options, and the hijackers should release some passengers as a positive signal. The hijacker took a hard stand and asked him to tell New Delhi that they would start shooting the passengers soon. He also said they had already got two foreigners to the front to be killed, and the responsibility of their death would rest with the Indian government.

  However, the Taliban, upon the advice of their supreme leader, raised hopes in India by declaring that they would storm the plane if the hijackers harmed anyone on board. This seemed a tactical ploy to let New Delhi believe that it had a chance to play ball with the Taliban while giving the Taliban a few brownie points.

  Ghanshyam could make out that ‘real’ negotiations would have to be undertaken immediately. He informed New Delhi that the hijackers were threatening to kill the passengers, that they were desperate, and that the assurance given by the Taliban would help the negotiations. But it was imperative that New Delhi send its negotiating team to Kandahar post haste.

  * * *

  New Delhi

  MEA Joint Secretary Vivek Katju is known in the foreign service circles as a hard nut to crack. Though there was initial amazement that a middle rung South Block official was to lead the team of negotiators, Katju soon proved his detractors wrong. A veteran of diplomatic ball games in the region, he was fairly knowledgeable about the situation o
n the ground—even though it was his first brush as head of a negotiating team. Involved also with Kashmir affairs, he had been actively assisting the Foreign Secretary and the External Affairs Minister during the entire crisis. The other man who was New Delhi’s voice to the hijackers was IB official A.K. Doval, a Kerala-cadre IPS officer. Doval had been in Kashmir for a while and had been involved in counter-insurgency negotiations with Kashmiri militants. With them were five more negotiators from RAW and IB.

  The negotiators knew that it was a difficult mission and could take days. The Indian Airlines Airbus A320 that took off with 52 passengers on board included a 30-member relief team. The aircraft took off at 3.00 p.m. and, apart from a 13-member cockpit and cabin crew, also had two doctors and a nurse on board. Seven engineers and technicians were at hand to carry out any repairs on the hijacked A300 aircraft.

  The flight also carried food, water and medicines. However, what not many knew was that among the technicians and staff in the Airbus were 20 commandos of the Special Action Group trained in anti-hijacking.

  The journey to Kandahar was not without its hiccups. Shortly after take-off, the plane had to return owing to a technical snag. Later, the Pakistanis created problems as the permission to fly over their airspace had expired, and they refused clearance. New Delhi once again activated diplomatic channels in Islamabad for permission to fly over its airspace. Eventually, the aircraft only took off at 4.35 p.m. The ATC control room at Indira Gandhi International Airport estimated arrival time in Kandahar at 7.00 p.m.

  At Kandahar, A.R. Ghanshyam informed the CMG that the delay had been communicated to the hijackers and they had agreed not to harm any hostages till the negotiators reached Kandahar.

  * * *

  On board IC 814

  The hijackers had informed us and the passengers that the previous night BBC had shown pictures of demonstrations in Delhi by relatives and friends of the hostages. This was very encouraging.