A Surreal Week of Terror and Laughter

The strangest moment in the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814 came at the end, when the terrorists, after eight days of death threats and beatings, turned and ordered the hostages to pardon them.

“Sorry, but everyone has to say that I am forgiven,” the hijacker code-named Burger said to the 155 haggard and dirty passengers.

When the hostages stared back in disbelief, Burger ordered them to say, “I forgive you.”

The passengers did as they were told.

“I waved goodbye and said, ‘I’ll miss you,’ ” said B. D. Bhojwani, a 26-year-old newlywed who, with his bride, survived the ordeal that ended on New Year’s Eve.

And then the hijackers disappeared into the desert.

For the passengers, the farewell capped a surreal week that began with the killing of a passenger, nearly ended with an empty fuel tank over Pakistan and wound down with the hijackers ordering the passengers to tell jokes.

The hijackers, who claimed to be fighting for a homeland in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, alternately terrorized and endeared themselves to their captives, filling the plane with sobs one minute and laughter the next.

“We were living in whatever environment the hijackers created for us,” said Devi Sharan, the pilot of the plane, who spent much of the ordeal with a gun to his neck. “They told jokes; we told jokes. They told us to get down, we got down. Everything depended on what they wanted.”

For Bhojwani, a manager for a U.S. chemical company, and his new wife, Meenakshi, 23, Flight 814 was supposed to take them home from their honeymoon in Nepal. They were married Dec. 11 and spent two weeks in the mountains around Katmandu.

The Christmas Eve flight carried several newlywed couples, and it was packed with tourists traveling in good cheer.

“This plane has been hijacked.”

At first, the words, as the Bhojwanis remembered them, did not ring true. They were sitting in the front row of economy class when five armed men started running up and down the aisles. They wore ski masks.

“We thought it was a Christmas joke,” Meenakshi Bhojwani said. “It was only when the cabin crew started pleading with the hijackers that we realized that it was a real hijack.”

Then things turned bad. Sharan, the pilot, felt a gun at his neck. The hijackers shuffled the passengers around, moving them from seat to seat, breaking up families and friends. They ordered the captives to put pillowcases over their heads, tighten their seat belts and lean forward. Most of the people did, but a few unlucky ones apparently did not. The passengers couldn’t see, but they could hear the hijackers beating and kicking.

“Most of the time, they told us: ‘Keep your heads down. If you see us, we will shoot you,’ ” said R. K. Ghosh, an Indian businessman. “We were so terrorized, nobody will be able to understand.”

The terrorists ordered Sharan to fly to Lahore, just across the Indian border in Pakistan. But as they approached, Pakistani authorities refused to allow the plane to land. Low on fuel, Sharan turned around and took the plane back across the border to the Indian city of Amritsar. As they waited for the ground crew to refuel the plane, the armed men grew agitated.

An excerpt of the conversation between Sharan and the control tower in Amritsar:

Sharan: “Please send it fast, send it fast, send it fast. Now guns are at our heads.”

Tower: “We are sending it very fast.”

Sharan: “Everybody will be shot down in another three to five minutes.”

According to different accounts, it appears that the refueling of the plane started at one point, and then stopped. When this happened, the hijackers became extremely angry.

Rippan Katyal, another newlywed returning from his honeymoon, was pulled from his seat by the hijackers and was blindfolded, gagged and stabbed. His 20-year-old wife, Rachna, was on the other side of the plane and couldn’t see.

Daman Soni was sitting next to Katyal and watched him slowly die.

“He kept crying for water for more than two hours before he finally bled to death in front of us,” Soni told the Hindustan Times. “There was nothing we could do.”

The hijackers went after another passenger, Katar Singh, cutting his throat. And then another.

“They beat me mercilessly. My hands and feet were tied,” D. K. Soni told the Pioneer newspaper. “I was the next to be killed.”

Despite their injuries, all the passengers but Katyal survived.

With very little fuel, the plane took off on the hijackers’ orders. Sharan told the terrorists that he didn’t have enough runway to lift off. The hijackers threatened to kill him. “I gave the plane full power, pulled back, and somehow the plane took off,” Sharan said.

As they approached the airport in Lahore in Pakistan, the runway was dark. Airport officials there had turned off the runway lights to discourage a landing. Sharan told the hijackers that the plane was running out of fuel. The hijackers said they didn’t care.

“They told me they were not going to die in India,” Sharan said. “They told me to crash the plane in Pakistan. I realized they were on a suicide mission.”

Sharan managed to land the plane in Lahore anyway, in the dark--with a minute and a half’s worth of fuel in his tank. As the plane sat on the runway, its tanks were quickly refilled, and Sharan took off again. That night, the hijackers took the plane to the United Arab Emirates, where they released 27 passengers--mostly women and children--and dumped Katyal’s body. His wife, Rachna, still didn’t know he was dead.

By the next morning, the airliner had made its final landing: Kandahar, in the desert of southern Afghanistan. Most of the country is run by the Taliban, the fanatical Islamic group that provides a sanctuary for the suspected terrorism mastermind Osama bin Laden. The hijackers thought they had found a home.

For the next six days, the hijackers kept the plane on the runway and the hostages in a cramped and filthy limbo. Window shades were kept down, and for much of the time, the passengers were kept blindfolded and bent over, sometimes for hours at a time. Each time the blindfolds went on, Meenakshi Bhojwani recalled, she thought it might be the end.

“Thirty or forty times, I thought, ‘This is it. We are going to die,’ ” she said.

After a few days in Kandahar, the toilets were full and spilling into the aisles. Passengers breathed thick and putrid air, and some were vomiting in their seats. Meenakshi Bhojwani’s legs swelled so much that her pants tightened around her legs.

Although many families had been separated, the Bhojwanis had managed to stay together. Unable to speak, they held each other’s hands and squeezed.

Despite the horrific conditions, some of the hostages saw a human side to the hijackers. They got to know the code names of all five: Chief, Bhola, Shankar, Doctor and Burger. Some of the passengers said the men spoke Hindi--the national language of India--and others said Urdu--the national language of Pakistan. In spoken form, the languages are nearly identical.

Over the course of the ordeal, the Bhojwanis struck up an odd relationship with Burger. He told the couple that he had a 2-month-old daughter living in India. He spoke English with what appeared to be an American accent.

Among many passengers, Burger gained a reputation as the nice guy of the bunch. When he discovered that passenger Pooja Kataria’s birthday was Dec. 28, he gave her a gift: a shawl with a hand-scribbled note: “To my dear sister, very happy birthday, from Burger.”

“I made a brother on the flight,” Kataria told the newspaper the Hindu.

At one point, Burger gave a little speech trying to explain the hijacking.

“We have a cause: Free Kashmir,” Burger said, according to Meenakshi Bhojwani. “We are innocent people. Our sisters have been raped. Our brothers have been tortured. We are followers of Islam. We are nice people.”

The worst day was Thursday, the day before they were released. The hijackers were demanding, among other things, that the Indian government release 36 comrades jailed in India. The negotiations, conducted by radio from the cockpit, were not going well.

According to B. D. Bhojwani, the collapse of negotiations was transmitted over the plane’s speakers.

“The negotiations are over,” they heard the hijackers shout at the Indians.

The terrorists came into the cabin and told the passengers to put their blindfolds back on. B. D. Bhojwani remembers one of them saying: “We will start shooting you. Start praying to your gods and your saints--we will give you 30 minutes for that. And let the first person to die be reassured that even the last passenger in this flight will be killed the same way.”

The passengers braced for their execution, but 30 minutes went by and they were still alive. A couple of hours later, the hijackers announced that the negotiations were back on track. The next day, after the Indian government agreed to release three jailed militants and give the hijackers 10 hours to get away, the hijackers bade their strange farewell.

Shortly after the hijackers fled, an Indian official entered the plane.

“You are all free,” he said.

The plane erupted in cheers.

The next day, B. D. and Meenakshi sat on a couch at a relative’s home in New Delhi and talked of soreness from sitting in the same spot for so long. They also managed a sense of humor. During their honeymoon, B.D. repeatedly serenaded his new wife with a popular Hindi-language song whose refrain goes “I want to sit with you for a long time.”

Meenakshi said to her husband, “I guess you got your wish.”