NEW DELHI, 6 October — Newspapers heaped scorn yesterday on security officials’ handling of a supposed mid-air hijacking that turned into a false alarm.
However, the government is patting itself on the back because its “contingency plan worked perfectly.”
“It worked like lock wok,” said the Civil Aviation Secretary, A.H. Jung. Commandos at the airport took position below the plane within three minutes of its landing, deflated its tyres and parked a fuel tanker in front of it. NSG Commandos, ambulances and fire tenders reached the site within minutes of plane landing, Jung added.
The hijacking that never was led to ministers being roused from their beds just before midnight on Wednesday and crack commandos storming the Boeing 737 plane with 52 people on board.
“Hijackass,” blared a front-page headline in the Indian Express. “Goof-ups galore in hijack farce,” read another headline in the Hindustan Times. “Predawn hijack a comedy of terror,” said the Times of India.
The papers wanted to know why officials kept on believing the flight to Delhi from Bombay had been seized long after commandos stormed the cockpit and found no hijackers and passengers told relatives on mobile phones all was normal inside the cabin. The drama broadcast live on nationwide television began when an air traffic control center got an anonymous telephone call warning the flight would be hijacked.
The message was transmitted to the pilots who locked the cockpit door and landed in Delhi where the plane was ringed by police, commando units and fire engines.
They then sat closeted in the cockpit for nearly three hours believing the hijackers were in the cabin while the crew thought they were in the cockpit. At one point Jung went on TV to say there were “two hijackers who spoke broken English”.
“Instead of expressing the view the ‘crisis management machinery was in good condition...,’ (civil aviation minister) Shahnawaz Hussain should be asking why a cloud of misinformation was left hanging for so long,” the Hindustan Times said.
