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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JungleInvestor who wrote (9028)	10/3/2001 10:12:09 PM
From: Think4Yourself	Respond to of 23153

Hijack hoax sparks India airports alert By Khozem Merchant and AP in New Delhi Published: October 3 2001 22:49 \| Last Updated: October 4 2001 01:59 Confusion reigned in India on Wednesday night after the country's full security procedures were triggered by an anonymous telephone call warning that a domestic airliner had been hijacked. Shanawaz Hussain, federal civil aviation minister, said the warning, received shortly after midnight, was a "false alarm" but that it had activated a series of responses at New Delhi and Lucknow airports. The three-hour drama unfolded after Ahmedabad air traffic control received the anonymous call and contacted the pilots of the affected aircraft, a Boeing 737 aircraft with 54 passengers and crew on board which was en route from Bombay to New Delhi, to warn them they had been hijacked. The aircraft, which belonged to Alliance Air, a domestic subsidiary of Indian Airlines, landed at New Delhi and was immediately surrounded by commandos, who later boarded it. A high-level crisis management committee was then convened at the headquarters of the civil aviation department in Delhi that was attended by Mr Hussain and Mr L K Advani, the interior minister. At about 4.30am local time Mr Hussain confirmed that the hijack was a false alarm. It is unclear who made the call to the authorities claiming that the hijack was taking place. By 5am all passengers and crew had left the aircraft. Local media said that passengers had thought the hijackers were in the cockpit and the pilots thought they were in the passenger cabin. Indian airports have been on high alert since the weekend when an anonymous call was received from a Kashmiri militant group warning Indian airports might be attacked. The most recent hijack of an aircraft in India was in December 1999 when a aircraft from Kathmandu to Delhi was taken. The 178 passengers on the airliner were released in exchange for a number of terrorists held in Indian jails. They included Masood Azhar who had been jailed for seven years. Mr Azhar is an Islamic cleric who helped found an organisation called Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which is on the US list of 27 terrorist groups whose financial assets it wants frozen. After his release, Mr Azhar went on to found the Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based terrorist group which this week claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Srinagar which killed at least 40 people. They have been at least six hijackings in India in the past decade.