[ad_1]
IC 814 captain Devi Sharan has revealed that there was a likelihood of at least 80-100 passengers being killed if a commando action was initiated at the Amritsar airport. The hijacking incident of December 24, 1999 is now a six-episode Netflix series, with actor Vijay Varma playing Sharan’s role.
In an interview with NY Times immediately after the hijacking, the Captain spoke about the flight, with 180 people on board, which was hijacked soon after it took off from Kathmandu and was taken to Lahore. However, Pakistan authorities did not allow the plane to land. As it was already running low on fuel, the plane was diverted to Amritsar, where it stopped for refueling.
From Amritsar, the flight was again taken to Lahore, where Pakistan authorities first tried to prevent landing, but eventually allowed it. Captain Sharan believed that “70 or 80 — perhaps 100 — passengers would have died” if there had been “a commando raid to try to end the episode.” The only hope for a peaceful solution lay in negotiations, he said, and “the hijackers were too nervous and too desperate to get out of India to have conducted them during that first night of the crisis in Amritsar.”
”They’d already cut the necks of two people. I was scared — scared they can kill anybody, everybody. I had to take off. I had no choice. They would have blown my head off. And if I was killed, they would have opened all the hand grenades and blown up the airplane,” he was quoted as saying.
The flight was eventually taken to Dubai, where 27 passengers were released. From there, the flight reached Kandahar in Afghanistan, where the-then Taliban government joined the negotiations for the release of passengers.
The episode ended with India agreeing to release Masood Azhar along with Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, all then affiliated with terror group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. Present-day NSA Ajit Doval, who was then the Intelligence Bureau chief, oversaw the handover and release of passengers.
Controversy over names of hijackers on Netflix’s IC 814 show
On Monday, the Union Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (I&B) summoned Netflix head of content over a controversy about “Hindu names” used as aliases by the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen terrorists involved in the 1999 hijacking. The five Pakistani hijackers of the Indian Airlines flight called each other using code names — Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola and Shankar — as shown in the series. The Netflix representatives were advised to keep religious sentiments and sensitivities of the public in mind, as per sources.
A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) was also filed in the Delhi High Court on Monday, seeking a ban on the series for the alleged distortion of hijackers’ names.
Click for more updates and latest Bollywood news along with Entertainment updates. Also get latest news and top headlines from India and around the world at The Indian Express.
[ad_2]
