Family Learns 2nd Relative Slain in Pakistan Hijacking

Kuverben Patel, 80, left her village outside Bombay for the first time in her life last Friday but got no farther than Karachi International Airport in Pakistan, where she was killed by terrorists and later cremated without her family’s knowledge, a family spokesman said Sunday.

Mrs. Patel had boarded Pan American World Airways Flight 73 to visit relatives in Huntington Beach. When the Boeing 747 landed in Karachi, terrorists stormed the plane, eventually killing 16 and injuring 127. The first reports listed Patel’s grandson, Rajesh Kumar, 29, among the dead and Mrs. Patel and her daughter, Gangaben Patel, 45, among the missing.

The Patel family, which lives on Grass Circle in Huntington Beach, received its first blow at 5 a.m. Friday, with a phone call from the State Department bringing word that Kumar was dead. The second blow came at 4 p.m. Sunday--confirmation of Kuverben Patel’s death. But that was not all. Although the news was sketchy, said Kumar’s cousin Dipak Patel, an uncle in Bombay had learned that Kuverben Patel apparently had been cremated in Pakistan soon after her death.

Little Help

With little help from the Indian or American governments, the Patels said, the family had to locate their loved ones by themselves. “We were let down by everybody,” Dipak Patel said Sunday. “We were left in a limbo land.”

The Patel family called a press conference just moments after hearing the news, an action fueled with the anger and frustration of days spent clawing for information through the bureaucratic red tape of several countries.

But they were not so hasty in telling Taraben Patel, who is in her 40s, of her mother’s death. By 4:30 p.m. Sunday, reporters had gathered on the lawn of the brown two-story house on Grass Circle. Soon after, the barefoot Dipak came through the front door to explain the slight delay before he gave his statement.

“We’ve been stalling to try to find words” to tell Taraben Patel the news, he said. “We fear it might give her a heart attack. We’re trying to get a doctor.” He returned to the house, and at 4:50 p.m., Taraben Patel’s screams could be heard across the quiet street.

According to Patel, his aunt, Gangaben Patel, was flown Saturday by Indian Airways from Karachi back to Bombay, where her brother was waiting to take her and their mother home to their village, Surat, to recuperate from the trauma of the hijacking.

“When the plane landed, my aunty was the only one on the plane that he knew,” Patel said. “When he asked my aunty where mother was she told him she (Kuverben Patel) had died in Karachi and her remains had been cremated. That’s all she could come out with. My uncle also told us she was in such a shock that she could say no more.”

A member of the State Department’s Pakistan Hijacking Task Force said Sunday night that she had spoken with Dipak Patel about the death and cremation of Kuverben Patel but had little information.

“We’re trying to find out about that,” said Elizabeth Soyster, a State Department spokeswoman. “We have passed on to the family all that we know. We don’t have much information at this point, no.”

No Knowledge of Her Fate

William McGarry, of the Pan American World Airways hijacking command center, said he had no knowledge of Kuverben Patel’s fate.

“The way the whole hijacking (information release) has been conducted by everyone involved is slap-happy,” Dipak said. “We’re not quite sure what happened in the plane itself. We were told about Rajesh’s death Friday but we had more concern about our grandmother and aunt (because) there was not much we could have done about Rajesh now.”

Since the Patels’ telephone rang at 5 a.m. Friday with the word of Kumar’s death, family members have called every government and airline official they could find. When that failed, they dialed friends and relatives in Karachi and the Bombay area.

“Nobody knew where the grandmother was,” Dipak Patel said, shaking his head in frustration. “None of the authorities know what happened to her.”

The official news they got was conflicting: At 9 p.m. Saturday, the State Department called to say Kuverben Patel was dead. A later call to Pan Am revealed that one airline official apparently had seen the older woman alive.

Confirmation From Bombay

Saturday night, Dipak said, was hell. Then came the call came from Chhotubhai Patel in Bombay, the confirmation the family needed--but dreaded.

Family members who had gathered to grieve and support each other took it hard, but Taraben Patel took it harder.

“It’s too late for my grandmother,” Dipak said. “They’ve already done the cremation in the wrong country. They didn’t even let my aunt (Taraben) go back and pay her respects to her own mother. It’s not nice. It (the cremation) could have been in a back street. It could have been at the airstrip. We don’t know.

“Now, we wait and hope that we get my cousin’s body back quick.”

Other Southland families whose relatives were on Flight 73 had better news on Sunday. Sanjay Patel, 17, a distant relative of Rajesh Kumar who was shot in the chest and leg, was still in stable condition at a Karachi hospital Sunday, said his uncle C.N. Patel of Cerritos. Although Sanjay Patel was doing well, no date has been set for his return to California, his uncle said.

And Urjita Parekh, 10, of Anaheim, was reunited with her aunt and grandparents in Bombay over the weekend. Her parents, Bharat and Prati Parekh, said the child is doing well and will return home as soon as Pan Am schedules a flight. Urjita was flying home from a summer visit with relatives when the hijack occurred.

“We spoke with her this morning,” said her father, Bharat. “She wants to come back as early as possible, but it looks like she is having real good courage and wants to come back with Pan Am and the same crew. We are much better now because we spoke with her.”