Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Frontline Pakistan
militant leaders from Indian prisons. Some of the hooded hijackers
would climb down occasionally to receive supplies or talk to officials.
The Taliban officials were visibly warm towards them.
Interestingly, the Taliban leaders, who in the past had scorned
foreign journalists and deemed photography as un-Islamic, were overly
amiable, providing them with facilities. There were no restrictions on
TV cameras and photography. The conservative Islamic administration
appeared extremely keen to have international publicity for the event.
Scores of media persons from the world over had descended on the
spiritual headquarters of the regime as the hijacking drama unfolded.
The eve of the new century brought an end to the hostages’ eightday
ordeal when the Indian Foreign Minister, Jaswant Singh, arrived
with the three men whose freedom was demanded by the hijackers.
Among them was a short, stocky man with an unkempt black beard.
A former leader of HuM, Masood Azhar was captured by the Indian
authorities in 1994 and held in prison on terrorism charges. Along
with him was a tall heavily built young man. A Pakistani-born British
national, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had been detained in Delhi’s
high security Tihar prison for many years on charges of kidnapping
three foreign tourists.
The hijackers stepped down triumphantly from flight IC 814, their
faces still covered, as Indian officials handed over the freed militants
to the Taliban authorities. Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the suave
Foreign Minister of the Taliban regime, won international praise for
his ‘deft handling’ of the hijacking episode. But the real-life drama
was taking place at the far end of the tarmac. The freed militants were
warmly greeted by Mullah Akhtar Usmani, the chief of Taliban forces
in Kandahar, and dozens of other senior officials of the fundamentalist
regime. They were joined by two of the hijackers, one wearing a
western suit and the other in safari dress. ‘Are you satisfied now?’ a
smiling Mullah Usmani asked the two men. ‘Indeed,’ replied one of
them excitedly. They were whisked away in a window-blackened
vehicle to an unknown destination. The three other hijackers also
vanished from the scene. 32
‘Everything had gone amazingly smoothly due to the Taliban’s
excellent political acumen and superb handling of the situation,’ Azhar
later recalled. It was the first time that a Pakistani-based militant group
had successfully used hijacking as an instrument of terror. The wellplanned
action was carried out by HuM: a group similar to LeT, but
which drew its recruits from less well-educated, unemployed youth,