IC Flight 814: What happened in the Indian Airlines hijacking?

( Spanish) –– On December 24, 1999, an Indian Airlines flight with 178 passengers on board was hijacked for eight days.

On that Christmas Friday, a group of hijackers of Muslim origin took control of flight IC 814 after it left Kathmandu, Nepal, in the afternoon bound for New Delhi, India.

Devi Sharan, the plane’s captain, was told to fly to Pakistan, then Dubai and finally Kandahar, Afghanistan.

That’s the synopsis of the Netflix miniseries “IC 814: Kidnapping on the way to Kandahar.” The 6-episode production, directed by Indian producer and screenwriter Anubhav Sinha, premiered on the streaming platform on August 29.

But it is also, in short, what happened in real life.

When a man wearing a balaclava entered the cockpit of the Airbus A300 he was piloting, Captain Sharan thought it was a jokehe said in remarks published by on January 2, 2000.

Then he saw that he had a gun: “I saw the revolver. It was a real revolver.”

There were five kidnappers in all. They initially demanded the release of 36 Islamic militants imprisoned in India, but the country refused to negotiate.

Sharan said that the hijackers used knives and threatened three passengers to take control of the plane. They killed one of them, an Indian national. “They tied his hands (…) to his seat and slit his throat (…) they cut his jugular vein,” the pilot said.

As the days passed, Indian officials learned that the hijackers had more weapons and grenades than they thought. Fearing they might blow up the plane, they began to negotiate.

The pilot said the hijackers threatened to kill the passengers one by one when negotiations failed.

It was a long process of negotiations between the then Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in which the Taliban authorities who governed Afghanistan at that time also intervened, reported EFE.

India eventually reached an agreement to release the passengers and crew in exchange for the release of three Islamic militants.

But the kidnapping, which lasted a week and left one person dead and 17 injured, is certainly a story worth telling.

The first order Sharan received from the hijackers was to head the plane to Pakistan, where they were denied permission to land.

They landed in Amritsar, India, and took off again a short time later, with very low fuel levels.

“I died many times, I died many times, at least when I took off from Amritsar,” Sharan said. He said the hijackers said: “We will not die on Indian soil. We will die on Pakistani soil. You will take him to Lahore.”

But Lahore airport was closed and the runway lights were off. The plane was running low on fuel. The pilot said the hijackers did not seem to care if he crashed the plane in an attempt to make a forced landing.

“I arrived in Lahore, everything was closed,” Sharan recalled. “The airport runway was closed. I had no other option. I had no fuel to go back to Amritsar. I had only one option: crash the plane.”

The pilot said he managed to delay the situation until Pakistani airport officials learned that “we had to crash this plane.” There they cleared the plane to land on the runway, with only “about a minute and a half of fuel left.”

After refueling, the plane departed for the United Arab Emirates, where the hijackers freed 26 passengers and the body of the passenger who died on board the flight.

Conditions on the plane deteriorated dramatically as the days passed. People were sick, the toilets were clogged and the air was stale. One diabetic passenger who needed medical treatment was allowed to leave the plane.

The plane eventually flew to Kandahar, Afghanistan. On Afghan soil, the five hijackers demanded that India release three imprisoned Islamic militants.

One of them, Maulana Masood Azhar, was being held by Indian authorities in connection with activities in Kashmir. India claimed he was a senior member of a group the United States considers a terrorist organization, reported.

“He was a known member of Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, which, as you may know, is part of Al Qaeda,” Sharan said.

Once India released Azhar and the two other prisoners demanded by the hijackers, almost immediately all 155 passengers and crew members on the plane were freed.

The kidnappers and the three freed militants then headed to the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta after leaving the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, then Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh said.

They left in vehicles from Kandahar airport, and Afghan officials gave them 10 hours to leave the country, Singh said at the time.

Two years later, Indian investigators and Sharan claimed that the techniques used by the Indian Airlines hijackers bore some similarities to techniques apparently used in the United States on September 11, 2001.

“They also crashed the plane there. In our case, they were also ready to die and crash the plane at any moment,” Sharan said.

“The demands they made and the people whose release they demanded (…) were definitely linked to Al Qaeda, (and) I would like to think that even the kidnappers were linked to this terrorist organisation,” said Nirupama Rao, then spokeswoman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs.