Indian Airlines Flight 814

Indian Airlines Flight 814, commonly known as IC 814, was an Indian Airlines Airbus A300 that was hijacked on 24 December 1999 by five members of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. The passenger flight, en route from Kathmandu to Delhi, was taken over shortly after it entered Indian airspace at about 16:53 IST. The aircraft had 190 occupants: 179 passengers and 11 crew members including Captain Devi Sharan, First Officer Rajinder Kumar, and Flight Engineer Anil Kumar Jaggia.

The aircraft was flown to Amritsar, Lahore, and Dubai. While in Dubai, the hijackers released 27 passengers plus the body of a male passenger whom the hijackers had stabbed multiple times at Amritsar. Later, on 25 December, the hijackers forced the pilots to land in Kandahar in Afghanistan. Most of Afghanistan, including Kandahar, was under the control of the Taliban at the time. External intervention was hindered by Taliban men encircling the aircraft, and by the presence of two officers from the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan. On 27 December after two days of internal discussions, the Government of India sent a team of negotiators headed by Vivek Katju from the Ministry of Home Affairs, which included officials Ajit Doval and C. D. Sahay. After days of negotiations, India agreed to release three men it had imprisoned for terrorism – Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar – in exchange for the hostages.

The hostage crisis ended on 31 December when the passengers and crew were released after the Indian government handed the three prisoners over to the Taliban. Despite Indian expectations that the three former prisoners and the hijackers would be arrested, the men were driven to the Pakistan border and released, and they have since been suspected of involvement in other terrorism-related incidents such as the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, 2002 kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, 2008 Mumbai attacks, 2016 Pathankot attack and the 2019 Pulwama attack. India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) charged ten people in relation to the case (with whereabouts unknown for seven including the five hijackers), of whom only two were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The hijacking is a part of the millennium attack plots in late 1999 and early 2000 by al-Qaeda linked terrorists.

Hijacking

On 24 December 1999, the flight took off from Kathmandu en route to Delhi after 16:00 IST. It entered Indian airspace around 16:39, and the passengers and crew were being served refreshments. As chief steward Anil Sharma completed serving the pilots their refreshments, a man wearing a mask and brandishing a revolver and a grenade accosted him and demanded access to the cockpit. At 16:53, the pilot was told that the flight had been hijacked. The Delhi Air traffic control was informed of the situation at 16:56.

The hijackers instructed the flight captain to fly west towards Pakistani airspace. The Crisis Management Group (CMG) of the Government of India led by union secretary Prabhat Kumar was not convened immediately, and the information concerning the hijacking was not communicated at that time to the Intelligence Bureau and the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW). Prime Minister of India Atal Bihari Vajpayee was traveling during the incident and was briefed regarding the incident only after he landed in Delhi. He later called an emergency meeting to discuss the situation. Meanwhile, as per later accounts, the hijackers ordered the crew to take away the food that had been served, separated the male passengers from women and children, blindfolded them and threatened them with explosives if they did not cooperate.