Covering the IC-814 hijack

Armed Taliban fighters at Kandahar airport on December 27, 1999. The hijacked Indian Airlines plane is in the background.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The controversial Netflix series, IC814: The Kandahar Hijack, has attempted to recount the events of 1999 for a new generation. Every journalist who covered the story at the time has their own personal narrative about the last week of the previous millennium when, instead of celebrating, India lurched through the harrowing ordeal of the IC-814 hijack, and the sadness and anger that followed the surrender of three dreaded terrorists at Kandahar.

My own story began six years before that, when I was a new recruit at CNN International. It was a slow news day in August 1995, and the office bell was rung by a courier carrying a video tape from Srinagar. As I popped the tape into the machine, a wave of sickness hit me. That image of a European man with curly hair in a green kameez, with his severed head placed on his body, still flashes before me. Hans Ostrø was among the six foreigners kidnapped by a group called Al-Faran, believed to be the Pakistan-backed Harkat-ul-Ansar, founded by Masood Azhar, who had been arrested in India in January 1994. They had been taken hostage at gunpoint in July 1995, when they had gone trekking in the Kashmir Valley, and the gunmen had demanded the release of Azhar in exchange for them. One hostage escaped, while the rest were never found. The kidnappers had carved the name of their group on Ostrø’s chest.

In 1994 too, the Harkat-ul-Ansar had kidnapped two sets of foreigners with the aim of exchanging them for Azhar. They had first kidnapped two British men, who they had been forced to release under public pressure. Their kidnapping later of four tourists had been thwarted by the police after a shoot-out. Omar Saeed Sheikh (later known as the killer of journalist Daniel Pearl), who had travelled to India to free Azhar, was injured and arrested in the encounter. Why the Indian government did not join the dots to realise how important Azhar was to the Inter Services Intelligence-funded operations in Jammu and Kashmir despite these kidnappings and prepare better for a bigger hostage situation will remain a mystery.

On December 24, 1999, I was at the Airports Authority of India building at Palam airport, getting permissions for our crew to film on the tarmac on New Year’s day, when the hijack took place. When an official told me about it, I thought it was a security drill. I realised something was wrong when senior officials rushed to the domestic terminal. Nothing had hit the airwaves yet, and my news editors in the U.S. were hesitant to even take the story live until it was confirmed on camera. The next few hours were agonising for the families. When the aircraft landed in Amritsar, there was hope that the crisis could be managed. But a hapless government was unable to ensure that it stayed in India, and there was never any public scrutiny of why our systems didn’t move quicker. There were other questions that never got answered too, as the hijack unfolded, such as why the international community — the U.S., the U.K., Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — which had influence over Pakistan and the Taliban, did not do more to end the crisis, or realise the fillip this attack would give terrorists globally. The 9/11 attacks took place just two years later.

I did not sleep that night until the aircraft landed in Kandahar, or much of the next week. Journalists faced similar sleepless nights through the four-day siege of Mumbai in 2008 and the three-day-long Pathankot attack in 2016. On December 31, 1999, I was on the tarmac, with dozens of journalists, when the External Affairs Minister escorted the three terrorists to Kandahar. We stayed there until he returned hours later with the freed hostages. While there was joy and relief for the families, there was also foreboding of what havoc those terrorists would wreak. Twenty-five years later, they are all free in Pakistan and have never been brought to justice for holding a nation hostage.

suhasini.h@thehindu.co.in