Hijacked – Flight 73: Hostage who survived the 1986 Pan Am aircraft assault finds out why one of many terrorists spared his life

Wearing a crimson cover jacket, an previous T-shirt and a Panama hat, all of which had seen higher days, Mike Thexton stood out like a sore thumb when he was the enterprise class part of Pan Am Flight 73.

It was 5 September 1986, the aircraft sitting on the tarmac at Karachi airport in Pakistan within the early hours of the morning. Desperate for an honest evening’s sleep and good meals as he made his method again to the UK from a mountaineering trek, Mike had swapped his flight to get house a little bit earlier and determined to improve for the primary time in his life.

“I can still call to mind the feeling as I put my bag down on this very big seat,” he says now. “I took out a book and thought: this is fantastic.”

The aircraft by no means took off. As it sat on the runway, Palestinian terrorists dressed as safety officers stormed the plane, armed with Kalashnikovs, pistols and explosives; it was the beginning of a terrifying 16-hour ordeal for nearly 400 passengers and crew on board.

Mike, aged 27 on the time, was taken hostage in direction of the beginning of the hijack after the terrorists collected passports and known as his identify. A gun was pointed in direction of him.

“By then, I was never in doubt they would shoot me,” he says. “I thought: somebody is going to die today, and it’s going to be me.”

In the top, nearly all of the killing was indiscriminate; weapons have been fired and explosives detonated in darkness because the aircraft’s energy went down after about 15 hours. Twenty-one individuals died and greater than 100 have been injured; however regardless of his preliminary call-up, Mike was spared.

Almost 40 years later, his story has had a unprecedented replace. As a part of a brand new Sky characteristic documentary, Hijacked: Flight 73, he was in a position to have a dialog with the person who held him at gunpoint – and found there was a cause he left the aircraft alive.

It begins with the motivation for his journey: his brother, Peter Thexton.

‘It was vital to me to see the place my brother died’

Peter was a physician and a climber who had died three years earlier, aged 30, on Broad Peak, the twelfth highest mountain on the planet.

Following an unsuccessful try on Everest in 1980, Peter was a part of a bunch aiming to climb K2 and used the close by Broad Peak, on the border of Pakistan and China, for acclimatisation to excessive altitude. During the trek, he developed fluid on his lungs and needed to be lowered right down to a excessive camp at 24,000ft. Despite efforts to avoid wasting him, he died in the course of the evening.

Mike, now 63, from southwest London, needed to honour his large brother. “It was important to me to see where he died,” he tells Sky News. “It was only years later when I had children of my own that I suddenly thought about my parents, that they would have not wanted me to go.”

On the aircraft, his first realisation one thing was incorrect was when he heard shouting. Then he noticed a person battling a flight attendant.

“He had a pistol in his hand, his arm wrapped round her. I remember thinking: that’s a man with a gun, how extraordinary. I didn’t duck or run away or go to help or anything, I just stared like an idiot.”

‘I used to be instructed to kneel within the doorway’

It shortly turned obvious the militants’ hijack was not going to plan. The giant plane, a jumbo jet, had an higher ground and there was confusion over the place the cockpit was positioned, giving the pilots time to flee – and subsequently no likelihood of the aircraft being beneath terrorist management within the air.

The terrorists have been a part of the Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO), which was chargeable for a number of assaults within the Eighties; the plan for Pan Am 73 was to drive the pilots to fly them to Cyprus and Israel, the place different members of their militant group had been jailed on terror fees. Rajesh Kumar, 29, was the primary passenger to be shot lifeless following failed makes an attempt to barter with officers on the bottom for the pilot to return.

When Mike’s identify was known as out, he acquired up. “I didn’t look much like my passport photo after a couple of months in the mountains, but I knew they would find me anyway. I felt I had to do what I was told.”

He remained calm. He had not witnessed the dying of his fellow passenger, however flight attendants had. He was requested if he was carrying a gun by the group’s chief, Zaid Hassan Abd Latif Safarini. “It was the most ridiculous question. I was probably very close to hysterics, I just burst out laughing… and then he told me to kneel in the doorway.”

The dialog with a killer

Crew members round him have been in tears. Mike tried to attraction to his captor. “‘Please, please don’t hurt me. My brother has died in the mountains, my parents have no one else’. He just waved his hand as if to say, I haven’t got time for that. That’s not important. In effect, I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and you don’t really matter.”

He was left within the doorway for a number of hours, satisfied he was going to die. In an try to attach with the attackers, he prayed, touching his head to the ground. “I stayed very calm,” he says. “I’d spent a couple of months in the mountains, mainly thinking about my brother and his death, and I just felt terribly sad for my parents. They had lost my brother… and then this.”

The hours rolled on and Mike finally fell asleep. “People ask how, but I was exhausted. It’s very tiring being afraid for that long.” He remembers being woken by one of many terrorists kicking his ft. “‘Up, up, move’, he said, and put me back with the others. I couldn’t understand it.”

As the facility went off and the taking pictures started, Mike made his escape as individuals poured out on to one of many wings of the aircraft. Like many others, he jumped. “For so many years afterwards, I thought about why they didn’t shoot me when they had the chance.”

The Hijacked documentary gave him the chance to search out out. Producers had made contact with Safarini, who’s serving a 160-year sentence within the US after initially being jailed in Pakistan for 15 years.

“I thought long and hard about it,” says Mike. “I certainly didn’t want people watching this film thinking I was having a friendly conversation with the man who killed all those people. But it was an opportunity I had to take.”

He had by no means forgotten the person he thought would finish his life. But maybe surprisingly, Safarini additionally remembered Mike Thexton. When Mike requested him why he was spared, he instructed him it was due to his brother. “I was speechless. It never occurred to me that he had even paid any attention, or cared, 12 hours earlier when I had told him that. It was stunning.”

The hero flight attendants

Mike is one in all a variety of survivors who share their tales within the new documentary. Another is Sunshine Vesuwala, who had been a flight attendant for simply six months earlier than the assault.

She remembers getting on the aircraft that day and noticing the doorways have been lacking from a storage cupboard. “It was kind of swinging and had no support at the bottom,” she tells Sky News. “It was a little worrisome. But it was actually the best thing because we managed to shove people into the galley under the counter, and they were saved.”

When Sunshine first noticed a person wearing a safety uniform holding a gun to a passenger’s head, she wasn’t afraid. “We thought there was something wrong with the passenger, that he was a smuggler or something,” she says. Then he grabbed flight attendant Neerja Bhanot. “That was when we realised it was us they were after.”

Before the attackers might discover the pilots, Sunshine was known as. “I was on my knees in the aisle; everyone had to put their hands in the air and just be quiet. He called me up – ‘you, come here’ – so I got up and I went.” She was requested to level out the cockpit and tried to stall. When the attackers realised the pilots had left, they requested her in the event that they have been males. “I said yes. He said they had run away, and he laughed.”

But it was the very best factor the captains might have accomplished, she says. “Any little thing in flight, under pressure… we didn’t know what they were up to and it basically comes down to lives being saved.”

When the attackers requested for passports, Sunshine helped acquire them. She hid these of white Americans, fearing they might be focused. As the hours handed, she listened out for the attackers doubtlessly revealing every others’ names, writing them down on plasters she was carrying for potential identification later.

“I really didn’t think we’d survive,” she says. “It was a question of delaying the inevitable.”

When the lights went out, a passenger managed to open a door amid chaos because the attackers began firing. “I could see people running. They got on to the wing and some were jumping. Everyone was in a panic. So I went out and whoever was going to jump, I let them jump. The wing was full and there was no way I could control the crowd.”

Rather than leaping herself, she went again into the aircraft with one other crew member to assist those that wanted it. Her colleague Neerja had accomplished the identical. Sunshine discovered her inside, injured. “She collapsed on the floor. We carried her and pushed her down [a slide that had been inflated].” Neerja was nonetheless alive at this level, says Sunshine, however later died of her accidents.

When she herself was again on the bottom, her first thought was to search out Mike.

“He was a hostage in the front for a very long time and I was worried,” she says. “I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. I saw him and just grabbed hold of him.”

Mike went on to put in writing a e-book about his expertise, What Happened To The Hippy Man? Now, he’s happy to have some solutions concerning the ordeal – and the way his brother’s story saved his life.

“I think [Safarini] thought that this person has lost somebody who was close to him,” he says. “Then it just becomes that little bit harder to shoot him. I was a real person, and I’d lost my brother.”

Hijacked airs on Sky Documentaries and Now from 29 April