Pan Am Flight 73: The Karachi Hijacking, Neerja Bhanot and the Men Who Got Away
Updated: Oct 6
Early on the morning of 5 September 1986, a van with a siren and flashing lights raced across the apron at Karachi airport and pulled up beside a Pan Am Boeing 747. Four men in security guard uniforms jumped out with assault rifles, grenades and explosive belts. Then they ran up the boarding stairs. Sixteen hours later, 20 people were dead, more than 100 were wounded and a 22-year-old flight attendant from Bombay had become a national hero.
The hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 is one of the deadliest in aviation history, and it's also a story that isn't finished. One of the hijackers is serving 160 years in America's toughest prison. The other four men charged over the attack walked out of a Pakistani jail in 2008 and have never been caught.
Quick Answers
● What happened? Four gunmen from the Abu Nidal Organisation hijacked Pan Am Flight 73 on the ground in Karachi on 5 September 1986, with 379 people on board.
● How many died? The FBI puts the toll at 20 passengers and crew, including two Americans. Some counts give 21. More than 100 were wounded.
● Who was Neerja Bhanot? The flight's 22-year-old senior purser. She alerted the cockpit, hid passports and was shot helping passengers escape. India awarded her its highest peacetime gallantry medal, the Ashok Chakra.
● Why couldn't the plane take off? The pilot, first officer and flight engineer escaped through a hatch in the cockpit roof within minutes, leaving no one to fly it.
● What happened to the hijackers? The leader, Zayd Hassan Safarini, was caught in 2001 and jailed in the US for 160 years. Four others were released in Pakistan in 2008 and are still on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list.
A Stopover in Karachi
Pan Am Flight 73 was a Boeing 747 called Clipper Empress of the Seas, flying from Bombay to New York with stops in Karachi and Frankfurt, according to the Pan Am Museum Foundation. There were 379 passengers, infants and crew on board when it sat on the tarmac in Karachi that morning. Around 78 of them were American, but the biggest group by far were Indian, along with Pakistanis, Britons, Mexicans and others.
The men who came for it belonged to the Abu Nidal Organisation, a Palestinian splinter group that had broken with Yasser Arafat and spent the 1980s carrying out attacks across Europe and the Middle East. Their plan, according to the FBI, was to force the plane to fly to Cyprus and use the passengers to win the release of Palestinian prisoners held there.
At around 6am their leader, a Jordanian named Zayd Hassan Abd al-Latif Safarini, drove the fake security van through a checkpoint and onto the apron. He and three other men stormed up the stairs, firing into the air.
The Pilots Who Climbed Out of the Roof
What happened next decided the whole day. As the gunmen burst in, the cabin crew managed to get the hijack code through to the cockpit. The pilot, Captain William Kianka, First Officer Conway Dodge and Flight Engineer John Ridgway did exactly what they'd been trained to do. They opened an escape hatch in the roof of the flight deck and lowered themselves to the ground on inertia-reel cables, about 30 feet down.
Without them the 747 wasn't going anywhere, and Pan Am backed the decision completely. Vice chairman Martin Shugrue called it "a textbook execution of what they are trained and taught to do." A volunteer replacement crew was on its way when the siege ended.
That left the hijackers stuck on the ground with a plane full of hostages and no way to leave. Pan Am's director in Pakistan, Viraf Daroga, spent the day negotiating with them through a megaphone. A young Pan Am mechanic, Meherjee Kharas, was forced to operate the cockpit radio at gunpoint.
Neerja Bhanot
The senior purser that morning was Neerja Bhanot. Born on 7 September 1963, she'd worked as a model before joining Pan Am, according to Confessions of a Trolley Dolly, a cabin crew history blog. She was two days short of her 23rd birthday.
Her road to that aircraft hadn't been easy. The daughter of journalist Harish Bhanot, she'd started modelling at 18 and appeared in adverts for brands like Binaca and Vaporex, according to Feminism in India, which gives her birth year as 1962 rather than 1963. In March 1985 she married and moved to Sharjah in the Gulf. Within about two months she'd walked out, after being starved of money and food and pressed for a dowry her family had been told wouldn't be expected. Back in India she applied to Pan Am, trained in Miami and was promoted to purser within a year.
She's credited with sounding the alert to the cockpit with a gun at her head. As the day went on, the hijackers ordered the crew to collect everyone's passports, and it soon became clear they were looking for Americans. Bhanot and her colleagues, including Sunshine Vesuwala and Madhvi Bahuguna, hid American passports under seats and pushed others down the rubbish chutes so the gunmen couldn't find them. In between, she handed out water, looked after children and tried to keep people calm.
The Murder of Rajesh Kumar
At around 10am Safarini decided to show the negotiators he meant business. He went through the passengers and picked out Rajesh Kumar, a 29-year-old from California who had recently become an American citizen. Kumar was taken to the front door, shot in the head and thrown down onto the tarmac, according to the FBI. The hijackers demanded that a crew be sent to fly the plane. The negotiators played for time.
Later in the day the gunmen called for a British passenger, Mike Thexton, a 27-year-old from south-west London. He'd been in Pakistan to visit the mountain where his older brother Peter, a doctor and climber, had died three years earlier. Thexton was made to kneel in the doorway for hours, convinced he was next. He wasn't.
Decades later, in the 2023 Sky documentary Hijacked: Flight 73, Thexton finally found out why. Safarini told the filmmakers he'd spared him because Thexton had told him about his brother, and he didn't want his mother to lose a second son, according to Sky News. "I was speechless," Thexton said. "It never occurred to me that he had even paid any attention." He'd already written about the ordeal in his 2006 book What Happened to the Hippy Man?
When the Lights Went Out
For hours the stalemate held. Then, at around 11pm, the auxiliary power unit that had been running the lights and air conditioning failed because of an oil leak, and the cabin went dark.
The hijackers seem to have thought it was the start of a rescue. They herded the passengers into the centre of the plane, said a martyrdom prayer in Arabic and then opened fire with their automatic weapons and threw grenades into the crowd. In a packed 747, the effect was horrific. Meherjee Kharas, the mechanic on the radio, was among those killed.
In the chaos, crew members got emergency doors open and passengers poured out, many jumping blind from the doors onto the concrete in the dark. Bhanot opened an emergency exit and helped people towards it. She was shot while shielding children from the gunfire and died on the way to hospital.
The Pakistani commandos who were supposed to end the siege had been staged around half a mile away. According to witnesses quoted by the Pan Am Museum, they didn't swarm the plane and didn't appear until the carnage was over.
Remarkably, the aircraft itself survived. Pan Am sent mechanics to Karachi, and the repaired Clipper Empress of the Seas flew out to Frankfurt five days later and went back into service.
The Human Cost
The FBI's figure is that 20 passengers and crew were murdered, including two Americans, and more than 100 were wounded. The Pan Am Museum breaks that down as 18 passengers and two Pan Am employees. Some accounts, including the FBI's own 2004 press release, give at least 21. The dead came from India, Pakistan, the United States and Mexico. The second American killed was Surendra Patel, a 50-year-old father of three, two of whose children were on the plane with him.
Many of the survivors carried the day with them for the rest of their lives. Years later, flight attendant Madhvi Bahuguna told WNYC that sudden noises still set her on edge: "Lots of loud clapping, it makes me nervous."
Honours for Neerja
Bhanot became a hero in India almost overnight. She was awarded the Ashok Chakra, India's highest peacetime award for gallantry. Pakistan gave her the Tamgha-e-Insaaniyat for her humanity. She also received the Flight Safety Foundation Heroism Award in 1987 and a US Justice for Crimes Award in 2005, and India put her on a postage stamp in 2004.
Her family set up the Neerja Bhanot Pan Am Trust in her memory, and since 1990 it has given an annual award to women who've overcome social injustice, a fitting tribute given what she'd been through in her own marriage. In 2016 her story reached a new audience with the Bollywood film Neerja, starring Sonam Kapoor. It won Best Hindi Film at India's National Film Awards in 2017, and Kapoor received a Special Mention.
She wasn't the only one honoured. Seventeen Pan Am employees and Viraf Daroga received courage awards from Pan Am and later from the US Department of Justice.
What Happened to the Hijackers
The hijackers were caught on the night and tried in Pakistan, where, according to most accounts, they were sentenced to death, with the sentences later commuted to life.
Safarini served about 15 years in a Pakistani prison. After he was released, US agents picked him up on 28 September 2001, in Bangkok, according to the Pan Am Museum. In December 2003 he pleaded guilty to all 95 counts against him in Washington, DC, including murder, air piracy and hostage taking, and agreed to testify against his co-defendants, per the FBI. In May 2004 Judge Emmet G. Sullivan sentenced him to 160 years in prison, made up of three consecutive life terms plus 25 years. More than 50 victims and family members flew in from around the world for the hearing. He's held at the supermax prison at Florence, Colorado.
The others weren't so easy to reach. Four men, Wadoud Muhammad Hafiz al-Turki, Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, Muhammad Abdullah Khalil Hussain ar-Rahayyal and Muhammad Ahmed al-Munawar, were last seen in Pakistan in 2008, when they were released, according to CNN. They've been on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list since 2009, with the State Department offering up to $5 million each for information leading to their capture.
In January 2018 the FBI released age-progressed images of all four, created from photos taken around 2000, to show what they might look like three decades on, according to the FBI. "We owe it to the victims and their families to never give up on them," said FBI Special Agent Terrence McIntyre, as quoted by CNN. None of them has been caught.
The Libya Question and the Fight for Compensation
Like the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie two years later, Pan Am 73 was linked to Colonel Gaddafi's Libya. Libya sheltered the Abu Nidal Organisation through the 1980s and gave it training and money, according to PBS Frontline. A US State Department report from 1986 said the group was particularly appealing to Gaddafi because of its "track record of successful terrorist operations." Gaddafi always denied any role in the hijacking. Abu Nidal himself was found shot dead in Baghdad in 2002.
When the US and Libya reached a claims settlement in 2008, most of the money went to victims of Lockerbie, the 1986 Berlin disco bombing and the 1989 UTA Flight 772 bombing, according to WNYC. American survivors of Pan Am 73 did receive compensation, around $150 million for about three dozen people according to PBS Frontline, and in 2010 some of them ended up suing their own lawyers, claiming the firm was trying to take most of the money, according to ABC News. Many of the non-American survivors, including most of the Indians on board, were left out. In 2011 they were still lobbying for a share of frozen Libyan assets, with US senators writing to the State Department on their behalf.
Why Pan Am 73 Still Matters
Pan Am 73 came at the height of the era of airline hijackings, a year after Hezbollah's 17-day hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and more than a decade after the US was so fed up with planes being diverted to Cuba that it considered building a fake Havana in Florida. It showed how vulnerable a plane was on the ground as well as in the air, and how much could depend on the quick thinking of cabin crew.
It's also a story about ordinary people who did extraordinary things. The pilots got out and stopped the plane going anywhere. The crew hid passports and opened doors. And a 22-year-old purser who'd been modelling a few years earlier gave her life getting children out of the dark. Four decades on, the men accused of killing her are still out there.
