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I left my constituency, Aurangabad, in the morning and flew to Mumbai for a meeting with party leaders. And I was scheduled to leave for Delhi by the late evening flight.
When I boarded the flight, everything was normal. Around 12.50 am, the flight landed at Delhi airport, but was not moved from the landing area.
After about ten minutes, I looked out of the plane window and realised that the plane was not parked in the usual departure area. I then checked with a crew member, who told me there was a "technical snag".
I was not satisfied by the answer, since I could see that by then, the plane had been surrounded by police and fire brigade vehicles. Also, the runway lights had been turned off.
I, and a few other passengers, began asking the crew why the aircraft doors were not being opened and finally, around 2.20 am, they told us that there was a hijack problem.
Immediately, the atmosphere began to get tense. But fortunately, not for long -- at around 2.30 am, the pilot announced that this was merely an exercise to check anti-hijack preparedness.
I had meanwhile asked the crew for permission to use the mobile phone, but I was told that to use the phone might disrupt communications between the pilot and air traffic control. However, I wanted to inform my family of the situation, so I made a call anyway -- and that was when I learnt that TV news channels were reporting that the plane had been hijacked and taken to Lucknow, and that two hijackers were present on board the plane.
By then, every passenger was busy calling up relatives and friends, reassuring them, exchanging information.
My wife and my mother called me up, and they updated me about what the TV channels were saying. My wife also told me that lots of friends and relatives had come rushing to our home, and that everyone was very tense.
The crew, too, were looking tense, and depressed.
Around 3.05 am, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called me on the mobile, asked me for an update of the situation, and assured me that he was personally looking into the situation. He told me to calm the fellow passengers down, and to tell them not to worry.
I in turn told him what I had learnt through conversations with Alliance Air officials in Mumbai, whom I had contacted on the phone. The airlines' director, Mukesh Bhatia,had told me that a call had come to the plane from Air Traffic Control, Ahmedabad, around 11.40 pm, saying that the flight was being hijacked to Lucknow. Bhatia told me, further, that our pilot had operated the hijack-alarm button, that is connected to all airports around the country.
In fact, Bhatia was surprised to know I was on the plane, because my name did not figure on the passenger list. It turned out that they had misspelt my name, the entry read Khare/C instead of Khaire/C.
As it turned out, what compounded the confusion was that by sheer coincidence, shortly after the pilot got the call from ATC, a passenger named Sharma wanted to get into the cockpit, and when the crew attempted to stop him, the passenger got into an argument.
The pilot, hearing raised voices outside, immediately locked the cockpit door.
It was around 3.15, more or less, when the crew warned us that unless we shut down our mobile phones, the hijackers on board would shoot us.
The plane was shrouded in silence, and in gloom. As long as people were in touch with their loved ones, things were okay, but once the phones were switched off, the mood changed. All of us believed that the hijackers were in the cockpit.
Around 4.15, the doors of the plane swung open and six men with guns barged in. I later learnt that they were National Security Guard commandos.
They rushed straight to seat number 12, where Sharma was sitting, held a gun to his head, and told the rest of us to stay calm, and disembark in orderly fashion.
I don't know what happened to Sharma, they probably detained him.
I alighted and went to the VIP lounge, where Special Commissioner Security (Delhi Police) R S Gupta told me that the police smelt something fishy in the incident, and added that he suspected Sharma was not an ordinary passenger.
What surprised me about the entire incident was that despite all this talk of putting sky marshalls on board all flights, there was no one of the kind on this one.
All that I had seen and heard convinces me that there was some conspiracy, some mischief at work. This was no mock exercise to test anti-hijacking measures, though eventually that is the colour that has been given to it.
I believe that if we have to prevent real tragedy some day, it is important for us to conduct a proper inquiry into the entire incident. It is vital to tighten security at airports and on flights, and it is very important, too, to find out who made that call from ATC Ahmedabad.
Shiv Sena Member of Parliament and former Maharashtra state minister for housing Chandrakant Khaire was on board the Alliance Air Mumbai-Delhi flight that was the centre of a false hijacking alarm in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday.
Khaire narrated his first person account to Basharat Peer.
Earlier Reports:
Alliance Air Bom-Del flight hijacked Crisis Management Group meeting in progress Govt for quick end to hijack drama: intelligence officer Bizarre 'hijack' drama ends peacefully One held in connection with 'hijack' drama Few takers for 'false alarm' theory 'Hijack a bid to discredit Pakistan'
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