Pan Am Flight 73

Pan Am Flight 73 was a scheduled passenger flight operated by Pan American World Airways from Bombay to New York City via Karachi and Frankfurt. On 5 September 1986, the Boeing 747-121 serving the flight, with 379 passengers and crew on board, was hijacked while on the ground at Karachi by four armed Palestinian militants affiliated with the Abu Nidal Organization. The cockpit crew escaped from the aircraft through an overhead hatch after being alerted to the situation by the flight attendants. Without the cockpit crew, the aircraft was grounded, foiling the hijackers' plan to fly the aircraft to Cyprus, where other members of their militant group were imprisoned.

While the hijackers demanded that the pilots be sent back to operate the aircraft, they shot an Indian-American passenger. They tried to identify other American passengers, their primary targets, by examining the passengers' passports. The cabin crew concealed the passports under the seats and in the trash chute, preventing the hijackers from identifying the American passengers. After a 17-hour standoff, the cabin lights went out due to a loss of power after the Auxiliary power unit failed and the back up battery ran out. The hijackers threw grenades and opened fire using automatic rifles inside the darkened cabin. The passengers and the crew tried to escape through the two exit doors that had been opened. The Pakistan Armed Forces entered the aircraft soon afterward. The hijack and the assault resulted in the deaths of at least 20 people, including the head purser Neerja Bhanot and Pan Am mechanic Meherjee Kharas.

According to US government officials, the hijacking was orchestrated by Libya in response to the 1986 United States bombing of Libya. Five people including the four hijackers were arrested and sentenced to death in July 1988 after a trial. Their sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment. Zayd Safarini, the leader of the hijackers, was later convicted by a grand jury in the US and was sentenced to a 160-year prison term in May 2005. The other four hijackers were released and deported to Palestine in 2008, despite objections from India and the United States. The four released hijackers are part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Most Wanted Terrorists list with a cash reward offered in 2009 to those who provide information on the whereabouts of the men.

In the aftermath, Bhanot was posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra, India's highest peacetime gallantry award and the Tamgha-e-Insaniyat, Pakistan's fourth-highest civilian award, among other awards. In 2006, the United States Department of Justice awarded the "Special Courage Award" to the cabin crew of the flight. The incident is portrayed in the 2016 Hindi-language film Neerja, based on Bhanot's life, and in Hijacked: Flight 73, a 2023 documentary.

Hijacking and takeover

Pan Am Flight 73 originated in Bombay and landed at the Karachi airport for a scheduled stopover at 5:25 a.m. A few passengers disembarked at Karachi and a new busload of fresh passengers from Karachi began boarding the aircraft. The four hijackers had earlier driven a vehicle that had been modified to resemble an airport security van and passed through the airport security point. At around 6 a.m., the vehicle approached the stairways used for boarding passengers for Pan Am Flight 73. Two armed men, dressed in airport security uniforms, quickly climbed up the stairs. There was also gunfire outside the aircraft reported around this time, which injured two Kuwait Airways ground staff working on an aircraft nearby. Soon, two other men joined them, one of them dressed in a salwar kameez and carrying a suitcase. They shot at the foot of Bhanot, who was at the door, forcing her to close to the door. The hijackers were armed with several handguns, assault rifles, grenades, and wore plastic explosive belts. While they took control of the aircraft, the cabin crew alerted the pilots in the cockpit by intercom. The cockpit crew subsequently exited the aircraft through the overhead emergency hatch, via the Inertial Reel Escape Device. The escape of the pilots immobilized the aircraft.