IC 814’s Captain Devi Sharan says media reports of hijacking put hostages’ life at risk: ‘Hijackers were getting information from news, were threatening me’ | Bollywood News

Netflix series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, directed by Anubhav Sinha, tells the real-life story of the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight which took off from Kathmandu and was taken to Kandahar for a week. IN the show, Vijay Varma plays the pilot, based on the real-life pilot of the flight Captain Devi Sharan Singh. In a video shared by Netflix, Captain Sharan and Vijay discussed the events of the flight and the pilot said that the media reports at the time of the hijacking were actually disadvantageous to the hostages. He insisted that the media coverage of the events was helping the terrorists in making their plans, and was actually putting the lives of the hostages in danger.

Captain Devi Sharan said, “The hijackers were getting every information, they had a transistor type of radio where they were listening to the news. That time what was being told by the media, so much information shouldn’t have been given out. It caused us a lot of damage.” He further explained that when he landed the plane in Amritsar for 45 minutes on the pretext of getting fuel, media saw it as a smart move by the pilot and said so. The hijackers, however, saw it as the pilot trying to get them killed and derailing their mission, which upset them.

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“When I landed the plane in Amritsar, some people of importance (in the news) said that the Captain had done his job, and the hijackers couldn’t stop him. The hijackers took this the wrong way, they said that me landing the flight in Amritsar was an attempt to get them killed. They were getting to know all of this through the news so they would threaten me again and again, and it prevented me from doing my job,” he said and added that this also put the lives of the passengers at risk.

In the show, Varma’s character Captain Sharan Dev, keeps his cool and manages to land in Lahore even in adverse circumstances.

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