Osama hijacked talks during Kandahar crisis

WASHINGTON, DC: One of the world’s foremost terrorism experts, Peter Bergen, told DNA on Wednesday that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden helped the Taliban regime negotiate the release of Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Mujahideen leader Maulana Masood Azhar during the December 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814.

“While Jaswant Singh (then external affairs minister) was negotiating with the Taliban’s foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil,” Bergen, author of two books on Osama, said, “it was actually Osama who was advising the latter and the Taliban’s (head of state) Mullah Omar what to do. He was working behind the scenes but was helping both the Taliban and the hijackers.”

Flight IC-814 from Kathmandu to New Delhi was hijacked on December 24, 1999, and taken to Amritsar, Lahore, and Dubai before finally landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The five hijackers demanded the release of three terrorists held in India. Jaswant Singh went to Kandahar to secure the release of 154 passengers and crew.

Bergen, who was in Kandahar at the time, said: “I did not know then, but the Kandahar airfield, where the plane was kept for a week, was one of the major bases of al-Qaeda, and Osama was in Kandahar at the time, helping the Taliban with the negotiations.”

In the event, India released Azhar, Ahmed Omar Syed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar in exchange for the passengers and crew. The released Indians were brought back to New Delhi on December 31.

“The unfortunate fallout of the release was that Azhar set up the terror organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistan soon after, while Omar Sheikh planned the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002,” Bergen said. “And although I have no evidence to prove it, Jaish-e-Mohammed may have been responsible for the attack on Parliament in December 2001.”

Bergen told DNA that Osama helped the Taliban negotiate with India because Mullah Omar was a local leader unfamiliar with the intricacies of dealing with international crises. “Mullah Omar had been to even Kabul only twice in his life,” Bergen said. “Osama, on the other hand, was a sophisticated person. He had seen the world, and knew how governments would react to hijackings. And since the Taliban was shielding him, it was natural for him to help them.”

Bergen is the Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, and an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.