Some Still Wait for News of Loved Ones on Hijacked Flight

Prati Parekh let out one final joyous scream at 5:40 a.m. Saturday. She had just hung up the phone after talking to her 10-year-old daughter, Urjita, a sixth-grade student who had escaped the carnage aboard the hijacked Pan American World Airways Flight 73 in Karachi, Pakistan.

“She said she was fine. I had been crying the whole day and night. I had not slept. I just had to scream one more time,” Parekh said Saturday afternoon at her home in Anaheim.

At least a dozen of the 384 passengers aboard the airliner were known to be California residents, and a number of those were among Southern California’s growing population of Indians. At least 16 passengers had been reported killed, at least 127 wounded, and Saturday, information on the fate of certain passengers still was trickling in to some families here. Trickling, in some cases, at a maddeningly slow rate.

One family in Cerritos was relieved Saturday evening to discover that a relative, Sanjay Patel, 17, had been wounded rather than killed. But they said they had to unearth the news themselves without any help from authorities.

Sanjay was shot in the chest and leg and was in stable condition at a Karachi hospital Saturday, his family said, but they had to call 16 hospitals and hotels in Karachi before locating him.

Because Sanjay is a British citizen, the U.S. State Department would not assist the family in its search, nor did Pan Am offer any help, the family said.

The family finally resorted to telephoning the British Consulate, but that turned out to be worse than frustrating, they said. The consulate returned the call around 3 a.m. Saturday with news that Sanjay had died.

The information was both shocking and false, said Sanjay’s aunt, Jashvanti Patel of Compton. “They confused his passport with somebody else’s.

“Whatever information we have, we have found out ourselves. We have had no help,” Patel said.

Jayant Desai, Sanjay’s uncle, said that relatives of other passengers who are not U.S. citizens face the same obstacles in getting information. Sanjay’s family owns a travel agency that booked more than 30 of the passengers onto Flight 73, and throughout Saturday, the agency received calls from anxious relatives seeking information that the travel agents could not supply, Desai said.

Sanjay is a distant relative of Rajesh Kumar, the Huntington Beach resident slain by the hijackers, but relatives said the two apparently did not know they were on the same plane.

Saturday was doubly traumatic for Kumar’s family.

As they grieved for Kumar, they also worried about the fate of Kumar’s 75-year-old grandmother and 45-year-old aunt, who were traveling with him when the hijackers took control of the airplane. It was the women’s first airplane flight and would be their first visit to the United States, a family member said.

Finally, late Saturday, the family received word from Pan Am that the two women were safe in a hotel in Karachi. “I talked to someone at the hotel, an Indian person, who told me that they had seen them and they were OK. We are very relieved,” said Dipak Patel, Kumar’s cousin.

He said the women eventually will continue their journey to Huntington Beach from Karachi.

But late Saturday, Kumar’s family said, they had not received word from Pan Am or the State Department regarding the transfer of Kumar’s body home for burial.

Waiting for Word

Nor had relatives of Urjita Parekh, the sixth-grader from Anaheim, heard word of when she will return home. “We cannot know that she is really all right until we get confirmation from Pan Am as to when she’ll be coming home,” said her father, Bharat Parekh.

Urjita, who had been scheduled to begin school Monday and who, along with her family, is scheduled to become a naturalized U.S. citizen Sept. 17, was returning from an eight-week vacation in India to visit her grandparents.

After news came of the hijacking and the brief but bloody storming of the airliner, Bharat Parekh recalled that the daughter of another Indian couple was on the same flight. He called the couple, and shortly before dawn on Saturday the couple told the Parekhs that Urjita was unharmed and staying in a hotel in Karachi with others from the flight.

They quickly placed a call to Karachi and heard Urjita’s voice on the line. “She said she was fine. We’re very relieved,” her father said.

A State Department spokeswoman said her office was referring relatives of non-U.S. citizens aboard the plane to the embassies of their respective countries.

“We’re only responsible for U.S. citizens,” the spokeswoman said. “I can’t tell you anything, and no one can tell you anything, about non-Americans. We do have some people who are not Americans that are on the medical evacuation lists--but there aren’t many.”

Made Attempts

Pan Am spokesman Jeff Krindler said the airline has made attempts to contact relatives of all the passengers.

“The nationality has no bearing. It’s the function of getting the information,” Kindler said Saturday night. “There are certainly some that we have not been able to reach as of yet.”

Pan Am spokesman James A. Arey in New York said that he sympathized with the families but that airline officials were doing everything they can. “It’s terribly difficult getting information from that part of the world,” he said.

The anxiety of no news was, for some, replaced by grief when news arrived.

Among the dead was Kala Singh, 35, the wife of a La Jolla book publisher, who was killed by a bullet in the head. Her husband, Sadanand, suffered a bullet wound in the arm, and her two children--daughter Kolpena, 13, and son Samir, 8--received minor shrapnel wounds from an exploding grenade, according to Linton Vandiver, a business associate of Singh.

Vinod Dave, a Bakersfield-area motel operator, was planning to leave today for Karachi, where his two daughters remain hospitalized. Like many children of Indian immigrants, the two girls had been on a summer vacation with relatives in the homeland, “learning the language, the life style . . . finding their roots,” Dave said.

They were returning to begin school Tuesday.

Critical Condition

His older daughter, Gayatri, 13, suffered only minor injuries when she jumped from an open door of the plane, Dave said. But his younger daughter, Gargi, 10, who also jumped from the plane, was reported in critical condition with head injuries.

“She is unconscious . . . in intensive care,” Dave said. “The doctor told us we should come there to see her. We are very much concerned about her condition.”

When the shooting erupted late Friday and news flashed on the television screen, “we were hysterical,” recalled Khiten Dave of Downey, a 43-year-old video store operator whose 11-year-old son Dwijal was aboard the airliner.

“We were listening to the news. We had the TV and the radio on. I started calling Pan Am, calling (family members) in India, trying to contact people in Karachi. My wife was crying. It was absolutely like hell.”

But unlike others, Dwijal Dave eventually was reported safe and uninjured.

“I talked to him (by telephone),” said Dave, who is not related to Vinod Dave. “He said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m OK. I ran like hell from the plane. . . .’ He was a little down, crying.”

At least eight of the passengers were young children returning to start fall classes, said Mona Bhuva, 20, of Alhambra, whose 11-year-old sister was also one of those aboard the flight. The sister, Preeta, was seated with the others in a special seating section set aside for unaccompanied minors, Bhuva said.

Stewardess Credited

Bhuva said the Indian passengers aboard the flight credited an unidentified Pan Am stewardess with opening an emergency door that allowed most of the children to escape. Preeta was one of those who made the jump and ran to safety unharmed, the older sister said.

“We think the stewardess opened the door in the back,” Bhuva said. “She let the passengers out. She’s the real hero.”

Bipin Shah, 39, of Van Nuys, said his two daughters also were among the unaccompanied children who were ushered off the plane. The two children, Avani, 11, and Rupal, 9, reported later by telephone that the lights on the plane went dark and the gunfire erupted. But a woman, who they believed was a Pan Am hostess, got them to safety.

“She pushed them out,” Shah said. “My daughters are not hurt.”

Family members talked of spending long hours after the hijacking monitoring television and radio reports, hoping that the Arab hijackers would decide to set women and children free. At the Bhuva household, six family members and relatives stayed up all night Thursday, hoping to hear word of young Preeta’s fate.

Then came news of Friday’s shooting spree.

“We went through the worst time in our lives,” father Harshad Bhuva recalled. “I had just finished a prayer, and I saw my (other) daughter crying. She couldn’t say anything. Then I heard the news on the TV--at least 100 people injured, a lot of people killed. I kept saying, ‘My daughter must be alive.’ ”

Three hours later, he learned that she was.

Times staff writer David Ferrell contributed to this story.