IC-814 hijacking: What government documents say about the names of the hijackers?
Netflix series 'IC-814: The Kandahar Hijack' has been embroiled in a raging controversy, with even a PIL being filed in the Delhi High Court on Monday seeking a ban on the OTT series over allegations of distortion of facts. The main point of contention is the names of the hijackers - Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola, and Shankar.??
PIL seeking ban on IC-814: The Kandahar Hijack
A PIL by Surjit Singh Yadav, a farmer and president of Hindu Sena, sought a direction to the Centre and Maharashtra government to cancel the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) certificate, alleging that by erroneously showing the hijackers as having Hindu names, including ¡®Bhola' and ¡®Shankar', which are other names of Lord Shiva, it hurt the sentiments of the Hindu community.??
'Distorting facts'
Many others, including BJP leader Amit Malviya, also criticised the series, saying that the filmmaker Anubhav Sinha legitimised the criminal intent of the hijackers.??
"The hijackers of IC-814 were dreaded terrorists, who acquired aliases to hide their Muslim identities. Filmmaker Anubhav Sinha legitimised their criminal intent by furthering their non-Muslim names. Result? Decades later, people will think Hindus hijacked IC-814," Malviya said in a post on X.??
Who were the real hijackers?
Many have alleged that this was a deliberate distortion of facts by the makers of the series, when the real names of the Pakistani terrorists were Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayeed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim, and Shakir.??
Where did the names in Netflix series come from?
However, it should be noted that they had used the code names Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola, and Shankar to communicate with each other.??
What government said about names of hijackers?
Even the then Union Home Minister's statement on 6 January 2000, stated that passengers knew the terrorists by their code names.??
¡°To the passengers of the hijacked plane, 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 press release said.
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