Indian Airlines Flight 814, commonly known as IC 814, was an Indian Airlines Airbus A300 that was hijacked on 24 December 1999 by five members of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. The passenger flight, en route from Kathmandu to Delhi, was taken over shortly after it entered Indian airspace at about 16:53 IST. The aircraft had 190 occupants: 179 passengers and 11 crew members including Captain Devi Sharan, First Officer Rajinder Kumar, and Flight Engineer Anil Kumar Jaggia.

The aircraft was flown to Amritsar, Lahore, and Dubai. While in Dubai, the hijackers released 27 passengers plus the body of a male passenger whom the hijackers had stabbed multiple times at Amritsar. Later, on 25 December, the hijackers forced the pilots to land in Kandahar in Afghanistan. Most of Afghanistan, including the Kandahar airport, was under the control of the Taliban. External intervention was hindered by Taliban men encircling the aircraft, and by the presence of two officers from the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan. On 27 December after two days of internal discussions, the Indian Government sent a team of negotiators headed by Vivek Katju from the Ministry of Home Affairs, which included officials Ajit Doval and C.D. Sahay. After days of negotiations, India agreed to release three men it had imprisoned for terrorismAhmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargarin exchange for the hostages.

The hostage crisis ended on 31 December when the passengers and crew were released after the Indian government handed the three prisoners over to the Taliban. Despite Indian expectations that the three former prisoners and the hijackers would be arrested, the men were driven to the Pakistan border and released, and they have since been suspected of involvement in other terrorism-related incidents such as the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, 2002 kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, 2016 Pathankot attack and the 2019 Pulwama attack. India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) charged ten people in relation to the case (with whereabouts unknown for seven including the five hijackers), of whom only two were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The hijacking is a part of the millennium attack plots in late 1999 and early 2000 by Al-Qaeda linked terrorists.

Background

Aircraft

The aircraft involved was an Airbus A300B2-101, registered as VT-EDW with serial number 036 and was powered by two General Electric CF6-50C engines. The aircraft carried 190 occupants which included 179 passengers and 11 crew members. The crew consisted of Captain Devi Sharan, First officer Rajinder Kumar, and Flight engineer Anil Kumar Jaggia. The passengers also included foreign nationals, amongst whom was Roberto Giori, the then-owner of De La Rue Giori, a company that controlled the majority of the world's currency-printing business at the time.

Hijackers

The flight carried five members of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) amongst the passengers.

Athar, the brother of Masood Azhar, along with his other brother Abdul Rauf Azhar and brother-in-law Yusuf Azhar, was involved in planning the hijacking..

HuM is an Islamist organisation based out of Pakistan. It had split from Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuI) in 1985 before reuniting in 1993 to form Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA). However, after HuA was declared a designated terrorist organisation by the United States in 1997, it changed its name back to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.