Indian Airlines Flight 814
Indian Airlines Flight 814, commonly known as IC 814, was an Indian Airlines Airbus A300 en route from Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, Nepal, to Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, India, on Friday, 24 December 1999, when it was hijacked and flown to several locations before landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Taliban men in front of the hijacked plane in Kandahar | |
| Hijacking | |
|---|---|
| Date | 24 December 1999 – 31 December 1999 |
| Site | Hijacked in Indian airspace between Kathmandu, Nepal and Delhi, India; landed at Amritsar, India; Lahore, Pakistan; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Kandahar, Afghanistan. |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type | Airbus A300B2-101 |
| Operator | Indian Airlines |
| Registration | VT-EDW |
| Flight origin | Tribhuvan International Airport Kathmandu, Nepal |
| 1st stopover | Raja Sansi Airport, Amritsar, India |
| 2nd stopover | Lahore Airport, Pakistan |
| 3rd stopover | Al Minhad Air Base, Dubai, UAE |
| Last stopover | Kandahar Airport, Afghanistan |
| Destination | Indira Gandhi International Airport Delhi, India |
| Occupants | 191 |
| Passengers | 176 (including 5 hijackers) |
| Crew | 15 |
| Fatalities | 1 |
| Injuries | 17 |
| Survivors | 190 |
The aircraft was piloted by 37-year-old Captain Devi Sharan and first officer Rajinder Kumar, with 58-year-old flight engineer Anil Kumar Jaggia. The Airbus was hijacked by five masked Pakistani militants of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) shortly after it entered Indian airspace at about 17:30 IST. The hijackers ordered the aircraft to be flown to a series of locations: Amritsar, Lahore, and across the Persian Gulf to Dubai. The hijackers finally forced the aircraft to land in Kandahar, Afghanistan, which at the time was controlled by the Taliban. The hijackers released 27 of 176 passengers in Dubai but fatally stabbed one and wounded several others.
At that time, most of Afghanistan, including the Kandahar airport where the hijacked plane landed, was under Taliban control. Taliban militiamen fighters encircled the aircraft to prevent any Indian military intervention, which was found by current National Security Advisor Ajit Doval when he landed there. They also found two Inter-Services Intelligence (Pakistan) officers were on the apron and others soon joined them; one was a lieutenant colonel and the other a major. Doval said that if the hijackers did not have ISI support, India could have resolved the crisis.
The motive for the hijacking was to secure the release of Islamist terrorists held in prison in India – fellow HuM members Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Masood Azhar, and a Kashmiri militant, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar. The hostage crisis lasted for seven days and ended after India agreed to release the three terrorists. The three have since been implicated in other terrorist actions, such as the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, 2002 kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, 2016 Pathankot attack and the 2019 Pulwama attack.
The hijacking has been seen as one of the millennium attack plots in late December 1999 and early January 2000 by al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.