Mike Thexton was 27, exhausted and ready to return home to Britain after a summer hiking in the Himalayas when he boarded a plane in Karachi, Pakistan. As fate would have it, the plane would never leave the runway.
At 5.44am on 5 September 1986, Pan Am Flight 73, which was en route from Mumbai to New York via Frankfurt, was hijacked. For 12 of the next 15 hours, Thexton, one of almost 400 people on board, was held at gunpoint by one of four hijackers, part of a Palestinian terror cell intent on selecting Americans but willing to settle for a Brit.
The men, armed with rifles and hand grenades, had already killed their first passenger, 29-year-old Rajesh Kumar, who had been an American citizen for just two months, shooting him in the doorway of the 747 and kicking his body on to the tarmac. They called Thexton forward after passengers’ passports had been gathered and sifted through for Westerners. He walked to the front of the aircraft. ‘I was numb hearing my name. I was trying to convince myself that there was some innocent explanation and maybe they’d let me off the plane, but I kept coming back to that they were surely picking me out to shoot me,’ Thexton recalls.
Pan Am chiefs negotiated from outside. Fellow passengers were herded into the plane’s centre. As the hours stretched on, children played to distract themselves and grown-ups prayed. Thexton, an accountancy teacher, feigned Muslim prayer in a bid to win his captors’ grace. He also pleaded with the ringleader, Jordan-born Zaid Hassan Abd Latif Safarini, to spare him. He had been in the Himalayas in honour of his brother, Peter, who had died there three years earlier. ‘I told him my parents have no one else, please don’t hurt me.’
The hijackers acted for Abu Nidal, then one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisations. It had been responsible for twin attacks at Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, killing 19 civilians and injuring over 100, and on 6 September 1986 would open fire at a synagogue in Istanbul, murdering 22. Israel and America topped its list of enemies, followed closely by the rest of the West.
Meanwhile, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was set on leading a radical fight against the West. Earlier in 1986, the US had bombed Libya, in retaliation for a disco bombing in Berlin, for which US President Ronald Reagan had pointed the finger at Gaddafi and Libyan-embassy staff were found guilty years later. Gaddafi was said to have links with Abu Nidal and tensions between him and Reagan were high. Pan Am, the US’s main international carrier, was a prime target for terror. Safarini planned to fly Flight 73 into an Israeli military target, in what could have been a precursor to 9/11, but things went wrong in the first moments when the pilots, following protocol, escaped through a hatch in the cockpit.
After 15 hours, the plane’s power unit shut down; it went dark. The terrorists opened fire. People howled in terror and pain. Twenty-two were killed in total; more than 100 injured. ‘I was convinced I was going to die,’ says Thexton, now 63 and, against the odds, one of the survivors. Shortly before, he had been allowed to rejoin the main cabin.
‘They then opened fire, everywhere, aimlessly. I heard a hand grenade, a Kalashnikov behind me and gunfire from the front. I heard them change magazines. Then it went quiet… I lifted my head to see the shape of a door [a passenger had opened it] against the night sky. I jumped off the port wing. I was underweight and wearing my mountaineering boots. I escaped with a scratch on my elbow.’
Almost 40 years on, Thexton’s account of one of the world’s most infamous hijacks is remarkable. So too is a conversation, rarer still, that took place last summer – between Thexton and Safarini, the terrorist who held him at gunpoint, currently serving a 160-year sentence in the US. The call, alongside other survivors’ testimonies, is featured in a new Sky documentary, Hijacked: Flight 73, and was brokered by its production team.
Executive producer Tanya Winston explains, ‘We thought hard about giving him a voice, but Mike wanted to talk with him to try and understand more about what happened that day.’
Director Ben Anthony was given a time to expect Safarini’s call, but practicalities were precarious – prison calls can be denied or end without notice. ‘I was on tenterhooks,’ remembers Thexton. ‘The main thing was nervous curiosity. Would he answer my questions, having effectively denied responsibility all these years?’ Safarini had never publicly talked about opening fire. ‘I wanted to be civil and obtain answers; I didn’t want to come across as friendly.’
The call came as scheduled one afternoon in June 2022, as Thexton paced his London kitchen. ‘It’s nice to hear your voice,’ Safarini told him. ‘I still remember your face. I cannot forget that day.’ His tone was eerily warm, but Thexton spoke little and listened intently.
‘What did you hope would happen?’ he asked the terrorist. Safarini explained that a suicide mission seemed his best way out of a life in the troubled organisation. ‘I am so sorry for that,’ Safarini said.
He told Thexton panic led him to open fire. It was the admission Thexton had hoped for. Thexton said, ‘I was expecting that you would shoot me and you didn’t. You put me back with the others.’ Safarini’s reply stunned him: ‘You mentioned to me that your brother is killed,’ he said in broken English. ‘I say, “OK man, just sit aside.” It touched my heart, actually.’
Thexton chokes back tears as he reflects on the conversation: ‘I was astonished. The call ended and I just stared at the phone. In all the years, having had half a dozen theories about why they didn’t kill me, I never imagined that. Peter died, but I didn’t, because of him.’
Anthony and his director of photography were the only other people in the room. He says, ‘Mike is stoic. We had spent weeks interviewing him… and he was always composed. When he learned his brother had saved him, his emotions cracked. The idea that he’d given him this gift from beyond the grave knocked us all for six.’
Thexton adds, ‘I like the truth to be told, I wanted to hear him admit it.’ But he also hopes there’s broader value. ‘I thought if a terrorist said publicly that he regrets it, maybe that would do some good somewhere.
‘I remember how absolutely desperate I felt when he had a gun to me. I’d whispered to a flight attendant, “Please tell my family that I love them very much.” But I was never going to hate him. I wasn’t going to die angry, afraid. I didn’t agree with any of it but I made myself look at him as a person with reasons.’
University of Salford psychotherapy lecturer Jennifer Darling, who has specialised in work with terror victims, explains how unusual a conversation like theirs is: ‘For terror-attack victims, speaking one-on-one with the perpetrator of their trauma is unlikely.
‘After traumatic events, making meaning of what has happened is difficult and the world around you is often shattered… Being able to make sense of trauma can restore their beliefs about the world.’
Typically, they are looking for answers. She says, ‘Understanding why [a perpetrator] did what they did can help. Lots of variables affect how people cope but, at the right time, in a controlled environment, it can be therapeutic. But if people are still highly distressed, the emotions can overwhelm them and it can backfire.’
Thexton and Safarini first corresponded in the mid-2000s. After Safarini was jailed in the US, Thexton wrote a book, What Happened to the Hippy Man?, and a friend wrote to Safarini, suggesting the men speak. Safarini wrote back quickly and, over 18 months, he and Thexton exchanged three letters each. Safarini didn’t provide answers
In fact, Thexton remembers, ‘I wrote in a very matter of fact way asking why he’d opened fire and that angered him… I can’t remember why I wrote back, but I did. His letters were up to six pages. He wrote about prison life and also about football… The last thing I wanted was to be chummy but we’re all human. If he wanted to talk about football, that was fine.’
His is not the only survival story. When gunfire ended, people dragged one another to a door where an emergency slide had inflated. They threw themselves down and leapt from the wings.
Sisters Sana and Farhana Rizvi had been travelling with their brother, Imran, 17, who was killed. Dwijal Dave was 11 and also survived. He had spent his summer with family in India, and was flying home as an unaccompanied minor. He remembers placating a younger child, across the aisle, with a toy car, then later reaching out for his hand to find him dead, something he says left him with intense guilt: ‘Why did I live and he didn’t?’
Sunshine Vesuwala was a flight attendant, and a hero. Now 58, a business owner in Ontario, Canada, and a mother of two, she had completed her training just months earlier. Minutes into the hijack, a gun was put to her head, then her back, while the men tried to storm the cockpit. She stalled for long enough for the pilots to escape. She was also ordered by Safarini to walk the aisles gathering passports. ‘I had to try and not give him what he wanted. If they were white Americans, I dropped their passports [back] into their laps. I hid passports under the seat as he demanded [I] filter through them.’
He made her drink beer with him (he told Thexton during their call that he had alcohol problems) and asked to open Champagne, saying it was his 24th birthday. She’d had a gun to her head for the first hour of the hijack. For the remainder, Safarini would point it at her every time she said something he didn’t like – ‘often’.
Vesuwala says, ‘They were cowards. I did what I could to create delays. It was a combination of training, personality and instinct… You don’t argue with someone bigger than you, you get sneaky. I didn’t think I’d come out of there alive so I may as well have gone doing good rather than hiding.’
She recalls a brief sense of relief when she and Thexton were allowed to rejoin the main cabin. Then gunfire. ‘Passengers were howling. It was unearthly. Children were hidden under seats.’
Vesuwala left India in 1994, but remained a flight attendant until 1995. ‘I loved my job. I wouldn’t have let what happened change that.’ But she rarely speaks about the hijack. ‘I internalised a lot. I was a strong person before but it brought out a lot of anger in me. I lost trust in human beings.’
Afterwards, she was asked to identify the hijackers, and taken to the hospital where the dead were lined up in a corridor: ‘There was a bunch of bloody shoes and clothes piled up in the basement. It was a very, very sad sight. It made me feel awful.’
She gave evidence at the trial in Pakistan. By then, the government was being accused of cover-ups. The high command had pushed stories that a commando raid freed the passengers, but witnesses deny there was any help; after shooting started, it was 25 minutes before commandos reached the plane.
‘Even when we were giving evidence [about escaping],’ Vesuwala says, ‘the Pakistanis tried to convince us our version of events was wrong. I stammered through the trial. I felt anger and disgust.’ The hijackers, she says, were smiling.
She has letters from passengers grateful for her quick thinking. And from Pan Am? A Cross pen. Hijacked reports how, following a years-long legal battle, Pan Am’s Indian crew won a share of compensation, but less than US citizens. In 2008, the US and Gaddafi agreed a $1.5 billion settlement to resolve all cases against Libya, including Pan Am 73, but only Americans were included.
‘Politics is a dirty game,’ says Vesuwala. ‘The horror of what happened was compounded by how the authorities dealt with it.’ Does it come back to her? ‘I don’t think of it often. Sometimes a movie triggers memories but it hasn’t ruled my life. I did the best I could. If I hadn’t, I’d have had to live with the guilt.’
The hijack of Flight 73, like others, failed to achieve its goals. During the same decade, there was a shift in terrorist activity towards aircraft bombings, including Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland, in June 1985, which claimed the lives of all 329 people on board; and the December 1988 Lockerbie bombing, of Pan Am Flight 103, over Scotland, which left 270 dead.
Philip Baum, MD of Green Light security consultancy and visiting professor of aviation security at Coventry University, says, ‘This was one of the last [terrorist hijacks] of that era and everybody lost. Today, hijacking is exceptionally rare, rarer still by terrorists.
It takes a group of people who believe they can all make it through a security system, which is more sophisticated now than it was then. Whilst explosives, especially homemade ones, remain a challenge, it is now very hard to infiltrate traditional hijack weaponry… through security.’
The gunmen and their accomplice were sentenced to death in Pakistan, later commuted to life imprisonment. Two weeks after 9/11, Safarini, who had been released from prison in Pakistan, was captured by the FBI and taken to the US. There, he later pleaded guilty to 95 counts, including murder. Thexton, Vesuwala and Dave were among those who attended his 2003 Washington court case. ‘I had to see what happened,’ says Thexton. ‘He was the man that was going to shoot me. He looked pathetic, broken.’
Vesuwala remembers: ‘He showed no remorse at all.’
In 2008, Pakistan released the other four men, apparently deporting them to Palestine. They remain on the FBI’s most-wanted list. The US put up a reward of up to $5 million each for information leading to their arrests or convictions.
For two years after the hijack, Thexton struggled to shake the images from his mind. ‘I carried around what had happened daily,’ he says. ‘I was jumpy. It constantly played in my head. Then… it went away. Occasionally, something might come back that derails me for a minute or two. But I have always talked about it as a story that happened to someone else.’
Since their call, he has written another letter to Safarini, thanking him for his honesty, but he is yet to send it. Despite Thexton’s exceptional capacity for listening and consideration, he has never wanted to cross the line from open-mindedness to sympathy.
‘I don’t think of him as Zaid Safarini who chose to spare me; I think of him as Zaid Safarini who tried to kill me. What happened lives in my brain as a thing that completely changed my life… The dominant thought I’ve had, all these years, is how lucky I am to have survived.’
Hijacked: Flight 73 airs on 30 April on Sky Documentaries and Now
