Kandahar hijackers were backed by Pak ISI: NSA Ajit Doval
JeM chief Masood Azhar, Ahmed Sheikh and Mushtaq Zargar were released as a consequence of the Kandahar hijacking of 1999.
New Delhi: Hijackers of the Indian the Indian Airlines flight IC-814 were supported by Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, who was one of the negotiators at the time, has alleged.
On December 24, 1999, the Kathmandu-Delhi flight was hijacked by five people soon after take-off, in what the worst hostage crisis in Indian aviation history. The flight had 180 passengers and crew on board.
According to media reports, Doval alleged that India could have solved the predicament if the hijackers were not aided by ISI, in Myra Macdonald’s new book, Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan lost the Great South Asian War. Macdonald was the former India Bureau chief for Reuters.
Subsequently, terrorists Maulana Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq Zargar were released to defuse the situation.
The report also stated when the negotiating team landed, they discovered that two ISI men, a Lieutenant Colonel and a major, were there along with Taliban on the tarmac. The team also realised that the hijackers were communicating directly with ISI officers in Kandahar further worsening the situation, according to Doval.
"We were getting very good intelligence about all that was happening. If these people were not getting active ISI support in Kandahar, we could have got the hijacking vacated," Doval was quoted as saying.
In the book, Doval also commented that the support given by ISI eliminated all the pressure the negotiators were trying to pin the hijackers under. " Even their safe exit was guaranteed, so they had no need to negotiate an escape route. That is not the way hijackers talk. Normally the biggest fear is how to get out," he was quoted saying in the book.
He further narrates the tight deadline that the team was working with. Wanting the crisis to end soon, the then NDA government was pressing to solve the situation before January 1. This intensified the pressure the team was under, he was quoted as saying.