NEW DELHI, 4 October — A reported hijack of a domestic flight from Bombay to New Delhi was a false alarm and all passengers have left the plane, Civil Aviation Minister Shahnawaz Hussain said yesterday.
The Alliance Air Boeing 737, with 52 people on board, was reported by air traffic controllers to have been hijacked on a late evening flight. It was immediately surrounded by commandos when it landed in the Indian capital.
Hussain, called to an emergency meeting with top ministers to discuss the reported hijack, said the scare was a result of confusion between air traffic controllers (ATC) in the town of Ahmedabad and the pilots.
“It was a false alarm. The confusion arose between ATC Ahmedabad and the pilots,” Hussain told reporters, adding that all passengers had been released safely.
“It was not a mock exercise or a planned exercise. We had assumed that the plane had been hijacked and the prime minister was also awake and was being informed,” he said.
Air traffic controllers in Delhi said passengers were filing out from the parked plane. “They are deplaning and the commandos have taken over,” an aviation source said. The flight, which was apparently diverted after leaving Bombay, had landed some three hours earlier in New Delhi.
Earlier some 100 policemen and a dozen ambulances and fire engines had gathered at the airport along with anxious relatives in a drama which ended in an anti-climax. A police officer said the aircraft had been surrounded by commandos of the elite National Security Guard.
Brijender Shekhar, an official at Delhi airport’s air traffic control had reported that “An Alliance plane from Bombay to New Delhi has been hijacked.” The Alliance Air Flight CD444 was on a scheduled Bombay-Delhi flight.
Star News television had said there were two hijackers on board and they did not speak very good English. There was no indication of the identity or motive of the hijackers, or whether they were armed or had made any demands or threats.
One air traffic controller said there were 52 people on board, including six crew. At the airport, one man, Manoj Kumar Grover, said his brother was on board the plane and had called on his mobile phone saying: “They are not letting us get down.” He said the passengers had been told to switch their cellphones off.
K. S. Jain, another passenger on board the plane, used his mobile phone to call his family and assure them he was unharmed. Jain said the passengers were safe although they were being ordered to stay quiet.
“There are announcements over the public address (system) for us to keep quiet.
“We do not know where they are and we don’t know what weapons they are carrying,” he whispered over his cell phone to his brother, Vinod Jain.
Another traveler, also speaking on a mobile, said the hijackers were in the “passenger area” of the plane.
India’s Civil Aviation Secretary A.H. Jang described the hijackers as “menacing”. “They are menacing. Menacing enough for the pilots not to open the cockpit doors,” Jang said, adding the parked plane had been “immobilized” by placing trucks in its path.
“We have established contact with the pilots. The cockpit is safe. There are two people who speak little English.
“We have communication with the crew and they stated the hijackers have something in their hands,” the official told reporters at New Delhi airport, without elaborating.
In Lucknow, capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, district magistrate Jiwesh Nandan said the pilots had wanted to go there rather than the Indian capital but that rain had meant it was impossible to land there.
India has been braced for attacks following the Sept. 11 assault on the United States. It was one of the first countries to offer support to Washington in its war on terrorism. Alliance Air is a subsidiary of state-owned Indian Airlines.
The Crisis Management Group of the Civil Aviation Ministry had been convened and it met at the Rajiv Gandhi Bhavan (ministry headquarters) in Delhi to take stock of the situation following the hijack of the airplane.
Union Home Minister L. K. Advani, National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, Foreign Secretary Chokila Iyer, Civil Aviation Minister Shahnawaz Hussain, heads of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and Civil Aviation Secretary A. H. Jung are present at the meeting.
