by Anil Jaggia
Red Cap told Captain Sharan: “Inform ATC that four of your passengers are dead.”
What had happened? Burger had made three requests to be allowed to kill the hostages. When Red Cap had stopped him, Burger had saluted respectfully in obedience. What had transpired suddenly to make him take the decision to kill four passengers without permission? Was there someone on the ground who was giving instructions —a chief above the chief in the aircraft?
The hijacker who had brought the appalling news now stepped forward and hit the back of my neck with his revolver’s butt. I blacked out. The pain was unbearable.
Amritsar
At 7.20 p.m. December 24, Amritsar ATC received a mysterious call from someone who claimed to be J. Lal from the Ministry of Home Affairs, Delhi. He enquired about the status of the refuelling, and then advised Amritsar to start refuelling the aircraft immediately Mulekar ordered the refuelling on Delhi’s behest, and the refuelling bowser was told to move towards the aircraft. Birdi reported this back to Sarabjit Singh in Chandigarh. Singh was surprised for he had no such information. He called up the CMG in Delhi and spoke with IB Director Shyamal Dutta about the mysterious phone call. The Home Ministry had no one named J. Lal on its rolls! It was becoming clear that the hijackers had links with, and were in constant touch with those on the ground—but who had made that call? (Though still shrouded in mystery, the call was ultimately traced to a cellphone in New Delhi that was registered in the name of a woman. However, she remains untraceable, adding a needle of suspicion to a well-planned plot executed in a professional manner.)
At 7.35 p.m. the phone rang again at Amritsar ATC. This time it was from the CMG. The Aerodrome Committee was informed that an NSG team had left for Amritsar, and it was vital that the refuelling of the hijacked aircraft be delayed further. However, it is intriguing as investigations revealed that the NSG plane from Delhi took off at 8.04 p.m. Yet it was imperative that the passengers remained unharmed. In Chandigarh, Dutta again spoke to Sarabjit Singh and said: “See if the tyres can be deflated.” Singh said he would try.
All this while, IC 814 had been pleading with ATC that the hijackers were threatening to start killing the passengers soon. Narenderjit Singh decided that it would be too risky to place any obstacle in front of the aircraft. Neither had he received any specific instructions from the CMG to do so. It was at this stage that the CMG clearly bungled as it gave no clear instructions. Besides it worked on the assumption that the aircraft had fuel for only ten minutes (accepting the Captains messages to the ATC under the fear of the gun, as the final word) and that the aircraft could not take off without refuelling.
* * *
On board IC 814
Inside the aircraft, I had nearly blacked out. As I tried to sit up, the hijacker who had hit me, caught me by the collar and pulled me up. I was dragged off to the first class cabin. Between the first class cabin and the galley, I saw a few passengers with their hands tied. But what I saw next sent a chill down my spine. In my 35 years of flying, I had not seen a more gory sight. Three passengers, their hands tied to their armrests, were bleeding profusely. Blood spilled down to the floor.
A large, blood-stained knife was pressed on to the back of my left shoulder and the hijacker asked: “Shall we do this to you too?” He kicked me hard on my left leg with his thick boots. A sharp pain seared through me but the sight of the three hapless passengers, blood dripping on the floor made my personal injury insignificant compared to the drama unfolding in front of my eyes.
The hijacker dragged me back to the cockpit and forced me into my seat. Stunned, I put the seat belt back mechanically over my shoulders. I couldn’t say a word. I was still trying to grapple with the unprovoked attack on the innocent passengers. So this is what sets terrorists apart from normal people: they are trained to kill, and kill without remorse.
The same hijacker now aimed the revolver at my head while the chief hijacker once again resumed the menacing countdown from the point where he had left off: “14 . . . 13 . . . 12 . . .” Once again he stopped and said: “Look, I’ll pull the trigger at 1.”
Rajinder radioed ATC: “They have already killed four persons. They are starting to kill everybody. Everybody.”
The bowser still remained stuck, and wasn’t any closer to us than before. Where is the bowser, yaar?”
“It is on the way, Sir.”
“What do you mean by ‘on the way’. You know they have already killed passengers.”
The deadly countdown was continuing.
* * *
In the executive class cabin
Daman Kumar Soni was sitting next to Rupin Katyal when the stabbings began. Satnam Singh was in the seat directly behind Katyal. As the flight had made its way towards Amritsar, the flight purser had been shifted to the twenty-fourth row. The hijackers had picked out eight well-built passengers, summoning them by crooking their fingers and making them get up. Daman Kumar Soni was among them. One at a time, they were asked to move to the executive class cabin where they were made to sit down, tightly belted in, and their seats reclined. “When I walked into the executive class, I saw an open bag with what looked like yellow nylon rope in it,” Soni says. “I wondered what it was for.” He was soon to find out. The rope was used to tie the wrists of all the eight passengers who were belted into the seats in the executive class cabin. “They looked like handcuffs,” remembers Soni. Among those who were handcuffed with them was a man called Chander Chhabra, a honeymooner whose name was Garg, at least another Indian in his thirties, and a foreigner with a beard and long hair who was blindfolded.
In the cockpit, when the countdown began, bits of it could be heard through the cockpit door. “As it progressed, Soni saw his life flash before his eyes. “It was excruciating. An image of my family deity flashed before me. I thought we were all going to die. It was a hopeless situation.” From the front, they could hear shouts: “Pilot, plane udao, plane udao (Fly the aircraft.)”
Loud, angry exchanges emanating from the cockpit and outside its door punctuated the air. A hijacker, later identified by the passengers as Doctor, came rushing up with a small knife, no larger than those used in a kitchen, to the rows where the passengers were tied down. “He started stabbing Rupin, hitting him repeatedly at least 20-25 times. It was all so fast, it looked like he was pounding a roll of dough.”
Doctor then went towards the cockpit door but came back and once more began to assault the mild-mannered Katyal with the small knife. He then moved to the seat behind him and began to attack Satnam Singh. While everyone else stayed quiet, Chander Chhabra began to plead for mercy. Doctor aimed a kick at his face to silence him.
Another foreigner, a Belgian, was also struck. Blood was soon dripping down the seats and on to the floor.
* * *
Amritsar
At 7.42 p.m. Vijay Mulekar had radioed Captain Sharan in the Airbus that they were sending fuel, and a bowser had moved into sight of the aircraft. Unknown to the hijackers, there were air force technicians concealed within the bowser, but the hijackers were too suspicious and too wary to be caught by unexpected developments. Captain Sharan’s messages to ATC had been increasingly frantic: “They are going to kill everybody. Four persons have already been killed.”
The bowser stopped short of the Airbus and ATC radioed Captain Sharan to move the aircraft close to it. The aircraft continued to move in 180-degree turns. But its next move took everyone by surprise.
* * *
On board IC 814
Inside the cockpit, Captain Sharan had made his preparations for take-off.
I told the hijacker that we would need to move to the start of the runway to attain take-off speed. The chief hijacker said: “No, you will take off from here. I’ve warned you, I’ll pull the trigger at 1.”
The slow countdown resumed. Clearly, the hijackers meant business.
Captain Sharan and I could take it no more.
When the hijacker said “. . . 2 . . .”, Captain Sharan said: “We have no
option. Let’s go,” triggering the Go-levers, while I pushed the throttles forward to full take-off power. A short take-off for such a large aircraft (an Airbus A300 weighs over 142 tonnes) is extremely risky When an airliner takes off, the pilot knows the variables such as payload, length of runway, wind factor, and so on. But here, the three of us were flying blind.
What we did know was that we had to make it in one attempt. For IC 814, there would be no second chance.
“We are taking off,” Rajinder cried into the radio. We are taking off, off. We are all dying now. No bowser—we are going . . .”
Seconds later, he confirmed that we had set course for Lahore just across the border, and without the benefit of permission.
“We are heading for Lahore.”
“Confirm fuel on board, Sir, now.”
“No fuel, no. You can inform Lahore about this. We have no fuel. They have already killed four passengers—it is confirmed, you do not understand. They want only refuelling from Lahore.
As Amritsar disappeared into the night, Red Cap said: “I don’t care if this aircraft drops out of the sky as long as it is out of this damn country.”
* * *
Amritsar
From the control tower, Vijay Mulekar and Inspector General Birdi watched the aircraft take off in a daze. They had seen to their horror that the aircraft had seemed headed for the bowser, and had just missed it by a whisker. Had the right wing hit the bowser, it could have led to a gigantic disaster. What had just happened was incredible. By a stroke of unlikely fortune, the crew had managed to convince the hijackers to land on an Indian airfield, and now the Airbus was gone. The window of opportunity had slammed shut in their faces. Mulekar called up the CMG and informed them that the aircraft had taken off. One of the most crucial mistakes of the hijack crisis had just been committed.
* * *
New Delhi
In New Delhi, an upset Vajpayee gave Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar a piece of his mind. Vajpayee had reviewed the situation with his Cabinet colleagues and members of the Cabinet Committee on Security and was upset at the manner in which the whole crisis had been handled from the very start. The meeting at the PM’s 7, Race Course Road residence went on till late at night and was attended by senior Cabinet members: Home Minister, L.K. Advani; Finance Minister, Yashwant Sinha; External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh; Information Technology Minister, Pramod Mahajan and Civil Aviation Minister, Sharad Yadav.
The meeting ended close to midnight after Prabhat Kumar and Brajesh Mishra shared information provided by the Intelligence agencies with those present. Vajpayee authorised Jaswant Singh to supervise the operations and keep him posted, while Advani was told to go to the CMG and monitor the situation from there. Jaswant Singh was to stay in touch with the Americans and speak with the foreign ministers of a number of other countries. Sharad Yadav left for the airport to take stock of the situation there.
Through most of the hijack, the Prime Minister monitored the situation from his residence. Brajesh Mishra kept him updated on the developments and Jaswant Singh kept in touch with other foreign governments and reported back to Vajpayee at regular intervals. The group dwelt on the options available to them. They also tried to establish the identity of the hijackers from the deluge of information that was coming in.
That the men in the hot seat had bungled was all too obvious already. They had failed to act in a real crisis situation and let the aircraft escape from Amritsar. There had been a clear lack of coordination: the NSG chief, a member of the CMG, kept a special commando team waiting at Delhi, while the designated government negotiators C.K. Sinha and N. Sandhu remained untraceable. While the crew of the ill-fated flight was trying its best to keep the aircraft at Amritsar, the best anti-hijack commandos in the country were cooling their heels in the belly of a plane at Delhi. Not only was precious time wasted in this puerile exercise—even the NSG failed to utilise the crucial hours to put its team together. It had been informed at 6.25 p.m. that it had to leave for Amritsar. According to the anti-hijacking drill laid down in the NSG manual, a crack team of 50 Black Cats and special aircraft are always kept ready in Delhi to tackle an emergency of this kind. They have a special hangar at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, and the commandos are supposed to be in a position to take off within 30 minutes of being informed of a crisis.
However, this didn’t prove to be the case. Though the commandos were in place at 7.10 p.m. and the aircraft was ready, the long wait for the negotiators kept getting prolonged while the minutes ticked away. It was only after a very long time that RAW negotiator C.K. Sinha was tracked down and rushed to the hangar where the NSG commandos were waiting. By the time the NSG commander was given clearance and the plane took off at 8.04 p.m., IC 814 had already taken off from Amritsar and landed at Lahore. They would not be offered the same opportunity again.
At Sarsawa near Saharanpur, RAW Special Forces had readied their commandos and a shadow aircraft. Its task: to tail the hijacked Airbus. In the absence of a green signal from the CMG, the shadow aircraft remained grounded while the hijacked plane continued on its doomed course.
* * *
On board IC 814
Minutes from Pakistani airspace, the flight radio on board IC 814 crackled once more to life: “Do not enter Pakistan. You will be shot down if you enter our airspace,” said Lahore ATC.
We were never in doubt about the authenticity of that threat. Ever since the Indian Air Force had shot down a Pakistan airforce PC-3 Orion naval reconnaissance aircraft with 16 men on board over the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, the Pakistanis had been thirsting for revenge. We knew that Pakistan would not hesitate to shoot us down. Yet, what choice did we have?
Captain Sharan, Rajinder and I shared our predicament with ATC Lahore. “We have guns on our heads. Please allow us to come in. Repeat, please allow us to come in.”
IC 814 crossed into Pakistani airspace. Luckily, it wasn’t fired upon by either Pakistani aircraft or missiles. ATC Lahore informed us that the runway was blocked, and that we would be unable to land. Even the approach lights of the runway and all the radio aids including VOR and ADF and ILS had been switched off.
As the huge aircraft approached Lahore city, we saw what appeared to be a runway with its lights on. As we began to descend in an attempt to land, the Airbus came down to 300 feet. For an aircraft of the size of the A300, this was just seconds from ground zero.
It was then that we realised to our horror that it wasn’t a runway; that, in fact, it had nothing to do with the airport. What stretched out below us was actually a highway. Rajinder was the first to spot it: “Boss, ye to road hai. (Boss, this is a road.)” There were vehicles moving rapidly on the highway, and there were stalls on either side. From inside the cockpit we could see food stalls and people wearing caps, perhaps soon after breaking their Ramzan fast.
Captain Sharan reacted instinctively and ordered: “Go around.” He pulled up the nose of the aircraft; I set the go-around power on the engines while Rajinder retracted the undercarriage and flaps. The giant bird rose up. We wiped the sweat off our brows. We had averted one crisis, but nothing was resolved.
Without fuel, and with the runway blocked, a crash seemed inevitable.
The unfazed hijacker kept telling us: “Crash it here, crash it here.”
* * *
New Delhi
When news of the sudden take-off from Amritsar reached Delhi where the Central Committee was keeping vigil at its control room situated at the Air Traffic Services (ATS) building at Indira Gandhi International Airport, the atmosphere became strained. With hardly any fuel and given the desperate nature of the hijackers, disaster seemed to loom ahead. Pilots and aviation experts began to air their views. “It seems we’re in a real problem and we ought to request Lahore to let it land,” said one, “and we have only a few seconds left.” Khola picked up the receiver to the CMG hotline and was given the go-ahead to speak to Lahore ATC. The CMG, meanwhile, informed Jaswant Singh about the
latest development and urged him to speak urgently to Pakistan.
At the Central Committee room, even the cold chill of December couldn’t stop some of the officials from sweating as Lahore ATC remained adamant about not giving IC 814 permission to land.
* * *
Indira Gandhi International Airport
At the arrival lounge of Terminal II of the Indira Gandhi International Airport, there was the usual crowd of relatives, some of them with bouquets, others with placards, who had come to receive the passengers of flight IC 814. There were a number of honeymooning couples on board, and hordes of relatives were waiting for them. The flight was delayed, and they were restive. They didn’t know yet, that their wait was to prove an endless one.
At 5.30 p.m. the phone in the room of the Station House Officer, Popinder Pal Singh, rang. It was the Senior Airport Manager, R.K. Sharad. “Mr Singh, there is an emergency situation. IC 814 has been hijacked,” he said. “I’m coming,”’ Singh replied, with an instinctive foreboding of a long night stretching ahead. He called his Deputy, Rajinder Adhikari, and asked the Duty Officer to request for additional policemen from the district reserves.
When he reached the arrival lounge full of waiting relatives, Singh and the airline and airport officials decided not to break the news themselves. They hoped the news would be broken to the crowds by someone else. They needn’t have worried. One of the relatives who had heard the news of the hijacking over the radio rushed to the airport, and soon the news spread like wildfire. All hell broke loose. In the midst of this, the airport display board refused to change the display for flight IC 814 from ‘delayed’, and airport and airline officials failed to satisfy the relatives concerned about the fate of their near ones. Hundreds of faces crowded the Indian Airlines’ counter as the crowds swelled.
The waiting relatives demanded answers but the officials had none to give them. “Why don’t you tell us something? Where are they? Who are the hijackers? Are the passengers safe?” asked V.K. Tyagi, whose brother and family were on board. “There are all safe, but we don’t know much at this stage,” the airline officials replied. There were heated exchanges as cellphones rang and the crowds grew.
