Anubhav Sinha is directing a series titled ‘IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack’. The series will be released this month, which is based on the 1999 Kandahar plane hijack incident. For the unversed, the incident took place on December 24, 1999, when an Indian plane that left Nepal for Delhi was hijacked and the passengers were held hostage for seven days. Instead of Delhi, the plane stopped directly at Kandahar. This incident created a stir not only in India but all over the world. Let’s know about the longest hijacking of a nation, that will soon be seen in a Netflix series.
176 passengers were travelling during the Kandahar Hijack
The day was 24 December 1999. Indian Airlines flight IC 814 took off from Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport for New Delhi. There were 176 passengers and 15 crew members on board the plane. Some hijackers had boarded the plane posing as passengers. As soon as the plane entered Indian airspace, the hijackers showed their true colours and took over the entire plane. They pointed guns at the crew members and passengers, beat them up and diverted the plane from Delhi to Pakistan. The news of the plane hijacking had reached India and there was chaos in the government department. The families of the passengers on board and the entire country were holding their breath. This incident was discussed all over the world because apart from Indians, some foreign passengers were also on board the flight. The hijacked plane had stopped for a while in Amritsar and then left for Lahore. The plane later landed in Lahore at 8:07 pm without taking permission from the Pakistani government.
The next morning, the plane left from Lahore for Dubai and from there landed directly in Kandahar, Afghanistan. When the hijacked plane reached Dubai, a passenger had a dispute with the hijackers and during this, he got injured. The hijackers dropped the blood-soaked passenger in Dubai itself, later that passenger died. Apart from this, 27 more passengers were released in exchange for refuelling, most of whom were women and children. Then a diabetic man was released. Apart from this, a woman suffering from cancer was allowed to go out of the plane for only 90 minutes for treatment in Kandahar. A few hours after the plane was hijacked, the hijackers started making expanding demands. These included the demand for the release of terrorists lodged in Indian jails. They also demanded a ransom of 200 million US dollars.
What did the Indian Government do?
The families of the passengers on the hijacked plane and the countrymen were not only angry but protests were going on in India. There was an NDA government in India at that time and Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the then Prime Minister. Currently, the National Security Advisor of the Government of India, Ajit Doval, was also involved in that operation. Kandahar was then ruled by the Taliban. They intervened in the matter and after that, the hijackers reduced their demands a bit. However, they remained adamant about the demand for the release of the terrorists. There was too much pressure on the government that finally, in exchange for the safety of the passengers, a decision had to be taken to take three terrorists from Indian jails to Kandahar and release them. These three terrorists were Maulana Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar.
Jaswant Singh was the foreign minister then and he himself reached Kandahar with the three terrorists. After the agreement between the government and the hijackers on December 31, all the passengers were released and all of them returned to Delhi. The then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself informed the countrymen about the release of the passengers from the hijacked plane and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The plane IC-814 was hijacked by Pakistani hijackers.
Talking about the series based on this incident, it will be released on Netflix on August 29. Stars like Naseeruddin Shah, Vijay Verma, Pankaj Kapoor and Kumud Mishra will be seen in the new web show.
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