The content head of Netflix India has been summoned by the government amid the massive controversy surrounding ‘IC 814’, a webseries on the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight by Pakistan-based terror outfit Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, sources have said.
The summons from the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry comes after hundreds of social media users accused the makers of the web series of deliberately changing the names of the hijackers to “Bhola” and “Shankar”. The web series is directed by Anubhav Sinha and is inspired by the book ‘Flight Into Fear: The Captain’s Story’ Devi Sharan, who was the captain of the flight and journalist Srinjoy Chowdhury.
The web series captured the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight 814 on December 24, 1999. The plane, with 191 fliers onboard, took off from Nepal’s Kathmandu and was headed for Delhi. Soon after take-off, five hijackers, who were posing as passengers, took control of the plane. It later made several landings, at Amritsar, Lahore and Dubai, before being taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan.
The government, then led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was forced to release three dreaded terrorists — Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar — from Indian prisons to secure the release of the hostages. According to reports, Taliban authorities helped the hijackers and the released terrorists reach Pakistan.
A Union Home Ministry statement dated January 6, 2000, said the names of the hijackers were Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim and Shakir.
“To the passengers of the hijacked place these hijackers came to be known respectively as (1) Chief, (2) Doctor, (3) Burger, (4) Bhola and (5) Shankar, the names by which the hijackers invariably addressed one another,” the Home Ministry statement says.
