(CNN Spanish) –– On December 24, 1999, an Indian Airlines flight with 178 passengers on board was hijacked for eight days.
That Christmas Friday, a group of hijackers of Muslim origin took control of flight IC 814 after it left Kathmandu, Nepal, in the afternoon, bound for New Delhi, India.
Devi Sharan, captain of the plane, was told to fly to Pakistan, then Dubai and finally Kandahar, Afghanistan.
That is the synopsis of the Netflix miniseries “IC 814: Abduction to Kandahar”. The 6-episode production, directed by Indian producer and screenwriter Anubhav Sinha, premiered on the streaming platform on August 29.
But it is also, in short, what happened in real life.
When a man wearing a balaclava entered the cockpit of the Airbus A300 he was piloting, Captain Sharan he thought it was a jokehe said in statements published by CNN on January 2, 2000.
Then he saw that he had a gun: “I saw the revolver. “It was a real revolver.”
There were a total of five kidnappers. They initially demanded the release of 36 Islamic militants imprisoned in India, but the country refused to negotiate.
Sharan said that to take control of the plane, the hijackers used knives and threatened three passengers. They killed one of them, an Indian national. “They tied his hands (…) to his seat and cut his throat (…) they cut his jugular vein,” said the pilot.
As the days passed, Indian officials learned that the kidnappers had more weapons and grenades than they thought. Fearing that they could blow up the plane, they began to negotiate.
The pilot said that the kidnappers threatened to kill the passengers one by one when negotiations did not prosper.
It was a long negotiation process between the then Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in which the Taliban authorities who ruled in Afghanistan at that time also intervened, EFE reported.
India eventually reached a deal to release the passengers and crew in exchange for releasing three Islamic militants.
But without a doubt, the kidnapping—which lasted a week and left one dead and 17 people injured—is a story to tell.
The first order Sharan received from the hijackers was for the plane to head to Pakistan, where they were denied permission to land.
They landed in Amritsar, India, and took off again a short time later, with very low fuel.
“I died many times, I died many times, at least when I took off from Amritsar,” Sharan said. According to him, the kidnappers said: “We will not die in Indian territory. We will die in Pakistani territory. You will take him to Lahore.”
But the Lahore airport was closed and the runway lights were off. The plane was running out of fuel. The pilot said the hijackers didn’t seem to care if he crashed the plane in an attempted crash landing.
“I arrived in Lahore, everything was closed,” Sharan recalled. “The airport runway was closed. I had no other option. I had no fuel to return to Amritsar. “I only had one option: crash the plane.”
The pilot said he managed to delay the situation until Pakistani airport officials learned that “we had to crash this plane.” There they enabled him to land on the runway, when he had only “approximately a minute and a half of fuel left.”
After refueling, the plane left for the United Arab Emirates. There the hijackers freed 26 passengers and the body of the passenger who died aboard the flight.
Conditions on the plane deteriorated dramatically as the days passed. People were sick, toilets were clogged, and the air was stale. A diabetic passenger who needed medical treatment was allowed to leave the plane.
Finally, the plane flew to Kandahar, Afghanistan. On Afghan soil, the five kidnappers demanded that India release three imprisoned Islamic militants.
One of them, Maulana Masood Azhar, was detained by Indian authorities in connection with activities in Kashmir. India claimed he was a prominent member of a group the United States considers a terrorist organization, CNN reported.
“He was a known member of Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, which, as you know, is part of Al Qaeda,” Sharan said.
Once India released Azhar and the two other prisoners demanded by the hijackers, almost immediately the plane’s 155 passengers and crew members were freed.
The kidnappers and the three freed militants then headed to the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta after leaving the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, India’s then foreign minister Jaswant Singh said. .
They left Kandahar airport in vehicles, and Afghan officials gave them 10 hours to leave the country, Singh said at the time.
Two years later, Indian investigators and Sharan claimed that the techniques used by the Indian Airlines hijackers had certain similarities to techniques apparently used in the United States on September 11, 2001.
“They also crashed the plane there. In our case, they were also ready to die and crash the plane at any time,” Sharan said.
“The demands they made and the people whose release they demanded (…) were definitely linked to Al Qaeda, (and) I would like to think that even the kidnappers were linked to this terrorist organization,” said the then spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs of India, Nirupama Rao.
