Netflix Series On Indian Airlines Flight IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack. On 24 December 1999, five masked men hijacked an Indian Airlines Airbus A300 – Indian Airlines Flight 814 – with 176 passengers onboard, which was en route from Kathmandu, Nepal to Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi.
Captain Devi Sharan was forced by the hijackers to fly the aircraft into Pakistani airspace but didn’t receive clearance to land. The plane landed in Amritsar, Lahore and, Dubai, before eventually landing Kandahar, in Afghanistan.
Then passengers were not spared, the hijackers took out their frustration on the passengers as they were denied permission from Pakistan’s Air Traffic Controller. One passenger was stabbed, and several wounded. The hijackers released 27 passengers in Dubai where the aircraft had been landed for refueling.
The aircraft was hijacked by Taliban-backed Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) militants with the motive to release their members from Indian jails. The hostage crisis, which went on for seven days, ended when Indian authorities agreed to release three terrorists. India was betrayed by the Taliban.
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IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack – Works of Anubhav Sinha
The six-episode thriller IC814: The Kandahar Hijack is the work of filmmaker Anubhav Sinha. The storyline has been adapted from the book ‘Flight Into Fear’ written by Captain Devi Sharan and Srinjoy Chowdhury.
It covers a whole many angles from Delhi’s War Room to relations with the Taliban and the love-hate relationship with Pakistan. IC814: The Kandahar Hijack highlights the ordeal that passengers of that flight went through as the new millennium dawned on them.
Sinha, who directed Thappad, the story is huge and involved a lot of research. He touched on the transition from feature films to series. The director shared that with the story divided into series, they found the freedom in the format’s flexibility.
Sinha said there is no fixed number of episodes when writing the script.IC814: The Kandahar Hijack stars Vijay Varma, Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Arvind Swamy, and Dia Mirza, among others. The series is set for release on Netflix on August 29.
