IC 815 Hijack: How The Names Of Hijackers Mentioned By Then Home Minister (image-instagram/itsvijayvarma)
The Netflix series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack was released on Thursday, based on the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 which is considered to be one of the worst terrorist acts in India’s history.
However, soon after the release of the series, a boycott campaign was carried out by a group of netizens against the series. The controversy on social media was stirred after the hijackers in the series were named “Bhola” and “Shankar”.
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Shedding light on the real incident, here are the details of the hijack which took place in 1999 as per then Union Home Minister LK Advani’s statement.
“Working in tandem with central intelligence agencies, the Mumbai Police has nabbed four ISI operatives based in Mumbai, who comprised the support cell for the five hijackers of the Indian Airlines Plane,” the statement read.
The names of the hijackers named by the arrested four Harkat-ul-Ansar (a group declared by the US as a terrorist organisation) are Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akthar Sayed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim and Shakir.
The statement released on January 6, 2000, states that to the passengers of the hijacked place these hijackers came to be known as Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola and Shankar. These names were used to address the hijackers in the Netflix series directed by Anubhav Sinha as well. Many netizens cited this as anti-government and pro-terrorist.
Soon after the release of the series, it topped among Google searches as over 20k searches were made with a spike of 200 percent on the topic in 16 hours, reports Indian Express.
The series created and directed by Anubhav Sinha narrates the events that unfolded during India’s longest hijacking which took place in 1999. The week-long hijacking in December 1999 brought the nation to a standstill. The terrorists hijacked the plane after it took off from Kathmandu in Nepal, after which it landed in Amritsar, and then in Lahore.
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The unfortunate incident took place when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime minister and Jaswant Singh served as the Foreign minister.
Vijay Varma, Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Patralekha Paul, Aditi Gupta Chopra, Arvind Swami, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Anupam Tripathi, Dia Mirza, Armita Puri, Aditya Srivastava, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Yashpal Sharma are Sushant Singh are the member of cast in the series.
