Gujarat Forensic Sciences University

IFS

Subject: Psychology in Homeland Security

Topic: “AI 814 Kandahar, Afghanistan.”

By,
Rahul Dave
MSHSAT
Sem2(TA 2)
000FSMSHS1617007
Introduction
Indian Airlines Flight 814 commonly known as IC 814 was an Indian Airlines Airbus
A300 en route from Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, Nepal to Indira
Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, India on Friday, 24 December 1999, when it
was hijacked. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen was accused of the hijacking.
The aircraft was hijacked by gunmen shortly after it entered Indian airspace at
about 17:30 IST. Hijackers ordered the aircraft to be flown to several locations.
After touching down in Amritsar, Lahore and Dubai, the hijackers finally forced
the aircraft to land in Kandahar, Afghanistan, which at the time was controlled by
the Taliban. The hijackers released 27 of 176 passengers in Dubai but fatally
stabbed one and wounded several others.
At that time most of Afghanistan, including Kandahar where the plane landed,
was under Taliban control, who resisted allowing the plane to land there. After
eventually granting the plane landing rights, the Taliban still pressured the
hijackers to release the hostages and give up on some of their demands. Taliban
fighters surrounded the aircraft to prevent any Indian military intervention.
The motive for the hijacking appears to have been to secure the release of
Islamist figures held in prison in India. The hostage crisis lasted for seven days and
ended after India agreed to release three militants – Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar,
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Maulana Masood Azhar. These militants have
since been implicated in other terrorist actions, such as the kidnap and murder of
Daniel Pearl and Mumbai terror attacks.

Hijacking
Anil Sharma, the chief flight attendant on IC-814, later recalled that a masked,
bespectacled man threatened to blow up the plane with a bomb and ordered
Captain Devi Sharan to "fly west". Four other men wearing red masks then stood
up and took positions throughout the aircraft. The hijackers wanted Captain
Sharan to divert the aircraft over Lucknow and head towards Lahore. However,
there was insufficient fuel. Captain Sharan told the hijackers that they had to land
in Amritsar, India.
Landing in Amritsar, India
At Amritsar, Captain Sharan requested refuelling for the aircraft. However, the
Crisis Management Group in Delhi directed Amritsar Airport authorities to ensure
that the plane was immobilised. The armed personnel of the Punjab police were
already in position to try and do this. They did not receive approval from New
Delhi. Eventually, a fuel tanker was dispatched and instructed to block the
approach of the aircraft. As the tanker sped towards the aircraft, air traffic control
radioed the pilot to slow down, and the tanker immediately came to a stop. This
sudden stop aroused the hijackers' suspicion and they forced the aircraft to take
off immediately, without clearance from air traffic control. The aircraft missed the
tanker by only a few feet.
Landing in Lahore, Pakistan
Due to extremely low fuel level, the aircraft requested an emergency landing in
Lahore, Pakistan. Pakistan initially denied the request. Pakistan also shut down
their air traffic services, thus effectively blackening the whole of Pakistan airspace
for the Indian Airlines flight and switched off all lights at Lahore Airport. With no
help from ATC, Captain Sharan banked on his visual instincts and began
descending on what he thought was a runway only to find out that it was a well-lit
road and aborted landing the aircraft in time. On understanding that the only
other option for the aircraft was to crash land, Lahore Airport switched on its
lights and allowed the aircraft to land. Lahore airport officials refuelled the
aircraft and allowed it to leave Lahore at 22:32 IST. Pakistani officials rejected the
pilot's request to offload some women and children passengers due to tense
relations with India.
Landing in Dubai, UAE
The aircraft took off for Dubai where 27 passengers aboard the flight were
released. The hijackers also released a critically injured 25-year-old male, Rupan
Katyal, who was stabbed by the hijackers multiple times. Rupan had died before
the aircraft landed in Al Minhad Air Base, in Dubai. Indian authorities wanted to
carry out a commando hijack specialist operation in Dubai involving Indian
military officials, which was rejected by the UAE government.
Landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan
After the aircraft landed in Kandahar, Taliban authorities, in an attempt to gain
international recognition, agreed to co-operate with Indian authorities and took
the role of mediators between the hijackers and the Indian government. Since
India did not recognise the Taliban regime, it dispatched an official from its High
Commission in Islamabad to Kandahar. India's lack of previous contact with the
Taliban regime complicated the negotiating process.

However, the intention of the Taliban was under doubt after its armed fighters
surrounded the aircraft. The Taliban maintained that the forces were deployed in
an attempt to dissuade the hijackers from killing or injuring the hostages but
some analysts believe it was done to prevent an Indian military operation against
the hijackers.

Media
The government found it difficult to handle the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight
IC814 to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1999 because of widespread media coverage
of the incident, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said today. ''The media
complicated the matter,'' Mr Saran said while inaugurating the third programme
for diplomatic correspondents. The media publicity proved to be a ''burst of
oxygen'' for the hijackers. The government of the day found itself in a bind as a
huge amount of coverage given to the hijackers on the one hand and the plight of
the passengers and their relatives on the other, he explained. Pointing out that
such crises cannot be sorted in public glare, he said all terrorist outfits, whether it
was Al Qaeda, Hizbul Mujahideen or Lashker-e-Toiba, were a threat to global
peace and none of them could be taken lightly by the intelligence agencies and
security forces.

Hostage Situation
Memories of the hijacking haunted the victims who lived under the shadow of
death for eight days. The flight with 182 people on board was hijacked by five
Pakistani nationals after it took off from the Tribhuvan international airport in
Kathmandu en route to New Delhi. The aircraft was taken to Kandahar after brief
halts at Amritsar and Dubai. It was only after three hardcore terrorists were
released that the hijacking episode ended on December 31.
Blindfold, famished and traumatised in the presence of five masked desperadoes,
who had commandeered the flight to the chilly clime of Afghanistan, they
remained huddled into their seats, thinking a bullet may be on its way to get
lodged inside them. Worse still, one of the hijackers may fish out a knife from his
pocket and stab any of them mercilessly. The hijackers, in fact, stabbed to death
Ripen Katyal after he did not adhere to their instructions.
``Start praying to whichever God you believe for your end is near,'' would bawl
one of the captors, and their slender hopes of survival would suffer a further
beating. A year after they came out from the trapjaw of death, the survivors of
the longest hijacking drama involving an Indian plane, which kept the nation on
nerve-wracking tenterhooks from December 24 to 31, 1999, continue to be
convulsed by an entire range of harrowing experiences - broken sleep,
nightmares, cold sweat.
For Mr. Chandra Mohan Katyal, who lost his only son Ripan, the lone casualty of
the hijacking, the gut-wrenching wounds are still afresh. Twenty-seven-year-old
Ripan and his wife, Rachna, had boarded the plane after a honeymoon trip to
Kathmandu, little realising that a tragedy lay in waiting. He was stabbed
mercilessly and bled to death. ``I was given $ 20,000 under the Warsaw
convention. But more important is that Rachna has got a job in the personnel
department of Indian Airlines, which will keep her busy. She is also doing an MBA
course,'' Mr. Katyal said, expressing his gratitude to Airlines officials. Besides the
loss of his 27-year-old son, there are some other memories which rankle in his
mind. ``On March 21, the U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton, during his visit to India,
invited us at his Maurya Sheraton suite. He talked to us with a great human touch,
offered financial help, looked grim and sympathetic and described the tragedy as
shameful.''
It was only then that he realised that while the leader of an outside country had
shown so much of decency, the political leaders of his own country had not even
sent a word of consolation or sympathy to him, Mr. Katyal said, ruefully. He also
blamed laxity in the security system at airports and indifference of authorities for
his personal tragedy.

``Only yesterday, I realised my eyes were brimming with tears. I can't explain it...
May be because it was this day last year when our trauma had started. The whole
drama was re- enacted in a flash in my mind and my composure cracked up,'' said
Mrs. Navneet Sharan, wife of Capt. Devi Sharan, who flew the plane.
Now the Sharans have built a house and are shifting today. She says pragmatism
has taught her to keep a track of LIC policies, which have now been inserted with
nomination. ``I have developed the capacity to take care of my house and my
children,'' she adds.
For flight purser, Mr. Anil Sharma, the heady feeling of freedom came along with
a shattering tragedy: he lost his father on the sixth day of the hijacking. ``My
father had been ailing but the hijacking must have contributed to his death,'' he
said.
``Things have become normal. I have gone back to the job. But as December 24 is
approaching, I am lapsing back into memories. It is not easy to forget when the
`chief', one of the hijackers, whipped out his pistol and brought it close to my
chest''. He was a no-nonsense man and meant business, said the flight purser and
recalled the December 31 threat by the hijackers to kill everyone. ``It could have
snuffed out the spunk and courage of the toughest of human beings, but we
survived''.
Then, it was he and co-purser, Mr. Sateesh, who lifted the body of Ripen and
brought it to Dubai, and ``the memory of it continues to give me a terrible feeling
and cold sweat,'' Mr. Sharma said. ``But the one consolation is that the role of the
cabin crew was appreciated by everyone, including the press''. But his one grudge
is that the security system at airports, with a few exceptions of
Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai and Calicut, is far from satisfactory. ``It needs to be
streamlined on an urgent basis to prevent an encore of such a mishap,'' he
averred.
The flight engineer, Mr. Anil K. Jagia, said the hijackers hit him with shoes, put a
dagger on his chest and manhandled him on several occasions. ``But it is better to
enjoy the sunshine of freedom than to live in the horror of the past. ``After all, we
are professional people and senior enough to cope up with the demands of the
job. All my family members have come out of the shock and are getting along
with their lives''. About Ripan, he said the crew members desperately wanted to
offload him at Lahore airport to provide him medical treatment, but the airport
authorities there refused permission that resulted in the tragedy. ``I have to live
with this ghastly incident with the rest of my life''.
A safe landing
When Indian Airlines's IC 814 landed at the Indira Gandhi International airport at
4.20 p.m. on Christmas eve today, it had a different crew, another call sign and far
fewer passengers than the flight that was hijacked a year ago to the day. The
landing was as smooth as any of the others, but 97 relieved passengers, besides
two infants, came out of the plane knowing they were part of an `anniversary'
flight from Kathmandu.

This morning the IC 813 took off for Kathmandu, an hour behind schedule,
commandeered not by the decorated Capt. Devi Sharan but Capt. S.P.S. Suri. And
by his side was Capt. Nar Singh and not Capt. Rajender Kumar. The Flight
Engineer, Ahuja, was on board instead of Mr. Anil Jaggiya, the co-author of a book
on the hijack to Kandahar.

A Major Cover Up?

Dulat in his book ‘Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years’ e writes that “no one in Delhi or
Punjab wanted to bell the cat.” He speaks of how “everyone shifted the blame to
the other” but does not predictably offer an insight into what was the crux of an
absolutely shoddy operation that did nothing for ‘national security’, in fact the
very opposite by exposing India’s vulnerable underbelly and her complete
inability under the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee government to deal with the
hijacking with some modicum of expertise and respectable dignity.
It was not a question of belling the cat as Dulat has put it in his book. It was
complete inefficiency, and exposed the inability to take decisions with panicky
knee jerk responses passing for thought out decisions and action. The episode
was followed by a massive cover up operation with all the players seeking to shift
the blame. The effort was not to review the mess-up but to cover up the chinks
with the classical game of obfuscation, All the officials involved in a shoddy
operation went on to get promotions, one of them is back again in harness today,
and the politicians in power worked overtime to cover up what should probably
go down in the annals of history as ‘what not to do when faced with a crisis.’ No
one was found guilty, no enquiry was instituted, no heads rolled, as the top brass
of the establishment were all involved in the seven day display of complete
confusion, ineptitude and indecision.
The story goes thus:
On December 24, 1999 IC 814 with 178 passengers and 11 crew members left
Kathmandu for Delhi. It entered Indian airspace at 5.30 pm and was hijacked
shortly after. According to interviews with the crew later, first a masked man
stood up and threatened to blow up the plane.Four others in red masks got up
and positioned themselves at different points in the aircraft.
They directed the pilot Captain Devi Sharan to fly to Lahore. Reports at that time
suggested that the pilot flew to Lahore, Pakistan clearly worried about the
possible consequences of an Indian hijacked plane on its territory, refused
permission. The captain of the IC flight then said there was insufficient fuel and
persuaded the hijackers to allow him to land the plane at Amritsar.
The government led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was thus given the
opportunity to intervene directly, block the aircraft from taking off, start
negotiations as a first step. Instead in less than an hour the aircraft was suddenly
airborne again, went on to Lahore where it was refuelled and asked to
immediately leave, went to Dubai by which time one passenger had been stabbed
to death and some others injured. Twenty six passengers were released in Dubai.
And from there the plane was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan, under Taliban
control at the time.
The hijacking drama stretched over a week, touched four countries, and finally
ended in Vajpayee and the government accepting the hijackers demands for the
release of three dreaded terrorists, and possibly the payment of a huge sum of
money. The ‘goof up’ happened from the time the aircraft landed in Amritsar and
took off again for Lahore in the first stage, and then during the negotiations and
the final decisions after it landed in Kandahar till the release of the passengers.
And the story reveals the complete inefficiency, panic, indecision of the
government, the agencies, and of course the Crisis Management team comprising
the top officers who were unable to manage their internal differences, let alone
the crisis.
Vajpayee had no idea about the hijacking for 100 minutes.
BJP member Kanchan Gupta provided a first hand insight into this, when he wrote
that Prime Minister Vajpayee was on board a flight then, and had no information
about the hijacking for over an hour. The clock had stopped clearly for the
government on the ground, and the passengers and crew members aboard the
flight.
Gupta wrote, “In 1999 I was serving as an aide to Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee in the PMO, and I still have vivid memories of the tumultuous week
between Christmas eve and New Year’s eve. Mr Vajpayee had gone out of Delhi
on an official tour; I had accompanied him along with other officials of the PMO.
The hijacking of IC 814 occurred while we were returning to Delhi in one of the
two Indian Air Force Boeings which, in those days, were used by the Prime
Minister for travel within the country.
Curiously, the initial information about IC 814 being hijacked, of which the IAF
was believed to have been aware, was not communicated to the pilot of the
Prime Minister’s aircraft. As a result, Mr Vajpayee and his aides remained
unaware of the hijacking till reaching Delhi. This caused some amount of
controversy later.

It was not possible for anybody else to have contacted us while we were in
midair. It’s strange but true that the Prime Minister of India would be
incommunicado while on a flight because neither the ageing IAF Boeings nor the
Air India Jumbos, used for official travel abroad, had satellite phone facilities.
By the time our aircraft landed in Delhi, it was around 7:00 pm, a full hour and 40
minutes since the hijacking of IC 814. After disembarking from the aircraft in the
VIP bay of Palam Technical Area, we were surprised to find National Security
Adviser Brajesh Mishra waiting at the foot of the ladder.”
By the time the emergency meeting headed by the Prime Minister was held,
information that the plane had landed in Amritsar came in.
And it is from here that the government and its crisis management group
collapsed. And as Gupta noted, “The hijacked plane landed at Amritsar and
remained parked on the tarmac for nearly 45 minutes. The hijackers demanded
that the aircraft be refuelled. The airport officials ran around like so many
headless chickens, totally clueless about what was to be done in a crisis situation.
Desperate calls were made to the officials at Raja Sansi Airport to somehow stall
the refuelling and prevent the plane from taking off. The officials just failed to
respond with alacrity. At one point, an exasperated Jaswant Singh, if memory
serves me right, grabbed the phone and pleaded with an official, “Just drive a
heavy vehicle, a fuel truck or a road roller or whatever you have, onto the runway
and park it there.” But all this was to no avail.”
It was announced that the National Security Guards had been alerted. Then
reporters were told, or at least found out, that they had been directed to reach
the spot. But there was no sign of India’s crack team, trained to tackle hostage
situations, at all. It turned out there was no aircraft to ferry them from Delhi
where the NSG was stationed to Amritsar, so the quick rapid action required
fizzled out from the start. The second version that this writer had not heard of at
the time but one that Kanchan Gupta mentioned in his article as well, was that
they were stuck in a traffic jam between Manesar and Delhi airport! Whatever be
the reason, the NSG failed to show up at Amritsar despite the 45 minutes the
aircraft was parked on the tarmac.
Dulat in his book has written that the then Punjab police chief Sarabjit Singh said
that he had never been told by Delhi to stop the plane from taking off. But that he
had told Delhi that he had “Punjab commandos trained in anti-terrorism
operations who could storm the aircraft but Delhi's response was that it did not
want any casualties.” At that time reporters covering the event wrote of how an
attempt had been made to block the path of the aircraft by moving a fuel truck,
but that it was such a clumsy effort that the hijackers were alerted and insisted on
the plane taking off for Lahore. The movement of the fuel bowser reflected the
chaos in Delhi, as it moved on to the tarmac, stopped and seemed to be waiting
for instructions.
After the plane flew off to Lahore - the next stop was Dubai and eventually
Kandahar - Dulat maintains that the "CMG degenerated into a blame game...with
the cabinet secretary being head of the CMG as one target and NSG chief Nikhil
Kumar, another." A major indictment as the Crisis Management Team sat for five
hours in the first instance, and clearly was unable to take any decision with sheer
chaos reigning.
Diplomacy, with the aircraft landing in three different countries, was knee jerk in
the form of desperate phone calls by Minister Jaswant Singh and Advani
respectively, to Pakistan to let the aircraft land and then to not let it fly off, to the
UAE authorities for the same but who allowed the US Ambassador in the country
into the airport but did not give permission to the Indian Ambassador, to the US
envoy here in Delhi for help that was not forthcoming. Clearly Indian diplomacy
was not working, with not a single government willing to take responsibility for a
hijacked plane that the Indian government itself had no idea what to do with.
L.K.Advani in his book wrote that he was in his North Block office, and was
informed of the hijack by the then Intelligence Bureau Director Shyamal Dutta. He
spoke of the emergency meeting convened by Vajpayee, that Kanchan Gupta
noted had been held 100 minutes after the event. So from Advani’s version it is
not clear what ensued during the intervening period, or if anything at all. As the
first action he writes of was the emergency meeting where “It was decided that
our first priority would be to immobilise the plane at Amritsar and make it
impossible for it to take off to any other destination outside the country.” But
clearly this priority did not work.
The Crisis Management Group (CMG), chaired by Cabinet Secretary Prabhat
Kumar, was activated to dispatch the message to the police authorities in Punjab.
The CMG decided to send a fuel bowser to the aircraft, carrying commandos who
would deflate its tyres. Dulat was a member of the CMG, as was the Intelligence
Bureau chief, as was the Union Home Secretary. Minister Jaswant Singh wrote
later in his book India at Risk, "I am still astounded as to how that could have
happened. The failure to get the NSG from Manesar to Amritsar in time, the
failure to organise the logistics is one bureaucratic muddle that still amazes me."
The aircraft went to Lahore that again did not want it to land, but given the very
low level of fuel it gave permission on the condition that the aircraft would leave
as soon as possible. Jaswant Singh spoke to Pakistan urging them to allow the
plane to land. Advani recorded his own conversation with the US Ambassador to
India Robert Blackwill “seeking urgent American assistance.” But even diplomacy
was not at its best and as Advani pointed out, while the US Ambassador to Dubai
was allowed into the airport by the UAE authorities., “curiously” the Indian
ambassador was not.
And interestingly, instead of introspecting in his book ‘My Country, My Life” of
why his government failed to block the aircraft Advani blamed the US, the UAE
and of course Pakistan for not doing enough. “I felt that the Americans, with their
considerable military presence and diplomatic influence in the Gulf region, could
have taken some effective proactive steps to put the hijacked plane out of action,
so that Indian commandos could be sent there to rescue the hostages.I was
deeply disappointed that they did not even try. A few days after the crisis had
ended, when Blackwill called on me, I expressed my displeasure to him. ‘This is
not what we understand by Indo-US cooperation in fighting terrorism,’ I told
him,” he wrote.
Advani recorded that “the CCS decided to send a team of three officials—Ajit
Doval, a senior officer in the IB known for handling tough operations, Vivek Katju,
a Joint Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, and CD Sahay from the RAW—
to Kandahar to negotiate with the hijackers as well as the Taliban authorities.”
Katju when contacted by The Citizen refused to give details of the negotiations
but said that the possibility of passengers being killed had clearly limited options.
Katju is now retired. Doval had gone on to head the IB in 200402005, retired, and
after a long hiatus is back in the saddle now as the National Security Advisor.
Sahay is with the Vivekananda Institute, the think tank that is perceived as the
recruiting ground for top officials in the current dispensation like Doval himself.
Advani of course, claimed in his book later that he was not in favour of
exchanging the terrorists with the hostages. Meaningless really as that was
exactly what was done.
The crack team of negotiators were unable to make a dent as the aircraft was
now in hospitable territory, Taliban controlled Kandahar with whom India had no
diplomatic relations. The Taliban surrounded the aircraft with armed militia in
record speed --unlike the Indian response in Amritsar---and insisted that this was
to protect the passengers. New Delhi read it as a clear effort to prevent Indian
aircraft from landing at the airport with commandos for a possible rescue bid.
The passengers relatives had by then gone into hysterical mode in Delhi, with
tears, protests making it that much more difficult for the terrified government. An
initial report had said that the hijackers wanted a hefty amount of cash, figures
varyingm and the release of 103, and then 36 militants in Indian jails. The
negotiations brought the figure down to three.
And then came the next ‘goof up’. The three terrorists were sent to Kandahar in
the same plane as Indian Minister Jaswant Singh. This created a storm in
Parliament that of course subsided eventually. Reporters at the time were unable
to confirm it, but the story making the rounds was that Singh had gone not to
ensure the passengers safe release alone but with the bounty that the hijackers
had asked for. This was never confirmed, and of course will never be, but reports
continued to circulate that the hijackers had been persuaded to whittle down the
number of men but not the amount of money they had demanded. The Taliban
gave them ten hours to ‘disappear’ which they did, to surface again later in terror
attacks against India.
Singh defended himself later, "It was not my decision alone. The entire cabinet
decided. Advaniji and Arun Shourie were initially opposed to it, even I was
reluctant but (then) Prime Minister Vajpayee felt that every effort must be made
to save the lives of the passengers hence we all fell in line.”