IC 814 Hijacked by Anil Jaggia & Saurabh Shukla

Author:Anil Jaggia & Saurabh Shukla [Jaggia, Anil & Shukla, Saurabh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 817436109X
Publisher: Roli Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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