2nd County Man Identified as Victim of Pakistan Hijacking

A 50-year-old Fullerton man was identified Monday by the State Department as the second U.S. citizen and Orange County resident killed in the bloody hijacking of a Pan Am jetliner in Pakistan.

Surendra Manubhal Patel, a vacationing 50-year-old computer programmer returning home with his two daughters, was among 18 people killed in the 16-hour ordeal aboard Pan American World Airways Flight 73 at Karachi International Airport, a relative confirmed Monday. Seventeen of the deaths occurred when the hijackers opened fire on passengers huddled inside the plane.

“It is very shocking,” said Pradeep Amin of Fullerton, a distant relative of Patel by marriage.

“The whole family, everybody, is very shocked and upset. He left three young children and we all wonder now what is going to happen to the family,” said Amin, whose cousin was a brother-in-law of Patel.

Rajesh Kumar, 29, of Huntington Beach was the first victim of four Palestinian terrorists who took over the jetliner. Kumar, who had become a U.S. citizen only weeks earlier, was singled out in the early hours of the hijacking Friday and shot to death.

Kumar’s 80-year-old grandmother, Kuverben Patel (no relation to Patel of Fullerton), also was killed. Grieving relatives in Huntington Beach learned Monday that her remains had not been cremated, as they originally were told, but would be returned with Kumar’s body at a later date.

Meanwhile, Southern California survivors of the hijacking--some still wearing bloodied clothes and bandages--began coming home Monday.

Clutching the X-rays of her wounded left leg, an exhausted Kankuben Gala, 67, of Tustin was wheeled off a Pan Am jetliner into the arms of teary-eyed relatives waiting anxiously at Los Angeles International Airport.

Gala was one of several survivors who were brought off in wheelchairs.

Still wearing the blue slacks and a purple sweat shirt bearing the dirt and oil marks of her leap to safety, Gala recounted her ordeal. She said a bullet hit her below the knee as she rushed to an emergency exit and jumped onto the airport Tarmac. Her back and neck were injured when other terrified passengers jumped down on top of her, she said.

“It was all confusion and panic. Nobody knew what to do,” she related in her native language through her son, Bharat, 32, a Tustin motel owner. “We just started jumping. There was gunfire. It was dark and I was very scared.”

Before the shooting, “all I could think of was my grandchildren, my grandchildren,” she said, as one tearful granddaughter circled her arms about Gala’s neck and the other granddaughter pressed at the side of her wheelchair.

“I’m thankful to be home. There are many crazy people in this world. I don’t know why they do the things they do.”

A total of 112 survivors of Flight 73 had arrived in the United States late Sunday, landing at New York’s Kennedy International Airport, where they were met by relatives, friends, reporters and photographers. At least 29 other passengers, including 24 American citizens, were being treated at U.S. military hospitals in West Germany.

Arrivals in L.A.

Pan Am officials said 16 survivors of the hijacking were booked on the plane that arrived in Los Angeles from New York on Monday afternoon.

Among them was T.M. George, 45, an auto parts store manager, who also was in a wheelchair. George was wounded in the back when he tried to shield his family from gunfire. The shooting began when the hijackers fired in panic as the lights went out in the Boeing 747 on a runway in Karachi, Pakistan, on Friday.

“We were helpless,” said his wife, Mary George, 37, of Norwalk. “We were ready to take what was coming because there was nothing else we could do. We just kept praying.”

The Georges’ two daughters, 8-year-old Priti, and 3-month-old Priya Joyce, were unhurt, but there was one close call when the baby fell from her mother’s arms as the family scrambled out on a wing to escape.

The Indian-born couple had taken their children on a vacation to Bombay and were returning home when the aircraft was commandeered.

“I thought we were going to die,” George said. “I lay down on my family, my small child and other baby . . . I wanted to save my family.”

As the shooting began to die down, said George, who, like his wife, is a permanent Southland resident, a flight attendant called out that an emergency exit was open. The couple grabbed their daughters and ran to the exit, only to find themselves on a wing, 18 feet above the ground, without an escape chute. They turned and ran back through the plane--and some gunfire--to the other wing, where they were able to slide to safety.

Concern for Relatives

Also meeting the plane was Harshad Shah, 40, a Los Angeles bank employee, who had waited through the days of fear and uncertainty to learn what had happened to his wife, Raksha; his 65-year-old mother, Jasumati; his son, Pratik, 3, and his daughter, Jignisha, 13.

He said he had asked himself over and over, “‘Why is this happening? Why are there crazy people in the world?”’

Shah’s family members, whom he had sent to Bombay to visit friends and relatives, were apparently uninjured. None of them said anything as they left the plane, except Pratik, who pointed at his father, and cried, “Daddy, Daddy!”

Shah wept.

Earlier Monday, Arun Athavale of Mission Viejo, a computer engineer, arrived at LAX on an American Airlines plane and was met by his wife, Prati, and son, Agay, 4.

Asked about the role of Pakistani commandos in ending the hijack episode, he said grimly, “None of the people saw any commandos.”

When the lights went out in the plane, he said, the terrorists “killed indiscriminately, firing their machine guns from less than a yard away.”

He said of a family of four sitting across the aisle from him:

“Two of them were killed and the others were wounded.”

Another Southern Californian who died was Kala Singh, a resident alien who lived in La Jolla. Her husband, Sadanand Singh, said she was killed when she threw herself in front of her son and daughter.

Word of Surendra Patel’s death reached Orange County relatives late Sunday through Pan Am officials, said Amin, who had been checking with the airline since he first saw Patel’s name on a published list of passengers.

Patel’s 12-year-old daughter, Nikita, suffered a minor head injury in the hail of gunfire. He said that both she and her 14-year-old sister, Sangita, have rejoined their mother and young brother, both of whom stayed behind with relatives in Bombay.

The Patel family had been vacationing in Bombay since mid-August, according to Amin. He said Patel was bringing his daughters home for the beginning of school this week. His wife, Manjula, stayed behind with her relatives in Bombay and their youngest child, Mehul.

Patel had been living in the United States since about 1966 and became a naturalized citizen several years ago, according to Amin. Patel was a manager of the computer programming department of a major oil company in Los Angeles, he said, and had lived with his family in Fullerton about eight years.

Relatives of Kumar, who some passengers said was shot by the hijackers when he objected to their rough treatment of a flight attendant, said Monday that Pan Am officials have not informed them when his body will be returned to Southern California.

When it comes, however, it will accompany the body of his grandmother, whose remains were erroneously reported to have been cremated in Pakistan, said family spokesman Dipak Patel.

Patel said the Indian Consulate in San Francisco informed them Monday that Mrs. Patel’s body had been located in Karachi. Pan Am officials later confirmed that report, he said.

Patel said surviving relatives were “very pleased” that a joint funeral service could be held for his grandmother and cousin. A third relative, Gangaben Patel, 45, daughter of the dead woman, survived the incident and has returned to Bombay.

Criticism Renewed

But he renewed his criticism Monday of U.S. government authorities, saying that Indian consular officials have been more helpful than either the State Department or Pan Am.

“We are pretty angry at the moment with the way responsible bodies have handled the situation,” Patel said. “We are dealing here with the fact that we had an American citizen shot down in a foreign country. The government has been not at all concerned about the family.”

After complaints by families in the United States that they had been unable to get accurate information about their kin on the stricken jetliner, a spokeswoman for a State Department task force said American consular officials were empowered only to deal with U.S. citizens.

“If we run across information about someone else,” said the spokeswoman, who did not want to be identified, “we’re not averse to passing it on. But U.S. consulate officers go out to hospitals and airports to help U.S. citizens in distress. Our responsibility is to assist U.S. citizens.”

The spokeswoman said that anyone calling the State Department for information about a permanent resident would have been advised to call the embassy representing the passenger’s nationality.

The task force was disbanded Monday because, the spokeswoman said, “no one else has come to our attention that still requires assistance.”

Times staff writer Steven R. Churm contributed to this report.