‘Symbol of our second birth’: IC 814 Kandahar hijack survivor keeps shawl gifted by terrorist despite ridiculing
Pooja Kataria from Chandigarh and her husband were returning to India from Nepal after a honeymoon trip when the IC 814 flight was hijacked and taken to Kandahar.
At a time when the controversy surrounding the Netflix series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack is brewing, a woman in Chandigarh has recalled the harrowing moments she and her co-passengers went through during the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight in 1999.
Pooja Kataria, a resident of Chandigarh’s Modern Housing Complex, got married on December 9, 1999, and was on honeymoon with her husband in Nepal. She and her husband were among 26 newly-wed couples returning to India from Kathmandu on the IC 814 flight, which was hijacked by members of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen terror group on December 24, 1999, and taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan.
Talking to The Indian Express, Kataria said, “I still can’t forget those moments. At first, we did not even realise what was happening. People had begun to panic.”
“December 27 was my birthday. On December 26, when one of the terrorists saw that people were getting panicky, he tried to calm them. I then requested him: ‘It’s my birthday tomorrow. Please allow us to go home. We are innocent.’ He then pulled out the shawl he was wearing and said, ‘have it, your birthday gift’,” she recollected.
The hijackers addressed each other using code names — Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola and Shankar. The hijacking ended over a week later, following negotiations and the release of three terrorists by the then BJP government. One of the 179 passengers on board died in the meanwhile.
“Finally before leaving, they announced their demands were met and they were sparing us. He came to me and said he would write on the shawl he gifted though I was scared. He wrote: ‘To my dearest sister and her handsome husband… Burger 30/12/99′. People are mocking me for this but I have still kept that shwal as a symbol of our second birth,” said Kataria, whose husband is a businessman. They have a 23-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter.
For the next ten years after December 1999, Kataria did not take a flight out of fear. Even today, when she takes a flight, she recalls those dreadful moments.
“When you don’t know whether you will return to your loved ones or not, it’s the most dreadful feeling. When we reached home safely, I couldn’t forget those seven harrowing days for years. It’s an incident I still tell my children about. Even when they take a flight, I remind them to always be careful,” she said.
The Netflix series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack has run into controversy after the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting summoned Netflix representatives over a lack of depiction of the role of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the 1999 hijacking. The summoning followed a row on social media over the use of the code names Bhola and Shankar by two of the five Pakistani hijackers and the omission of their real names — Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayed, Sunny, Ahmad Qazi, Zahoor Mistry and Shakir.
After the meeting, Netflix announced that it would update the series’ opening disclaimer to include the terrorists’ real names in addition to their codenames.