Pan Am Flight 73: The 1986 Karachi Hijacking P4

that was taken, a moment where the world revealed itself to be more cruel, more random,

“more dangerous than you wanted to believe. A grudge, an anger, a hurt. And once you know”

that, once you've seen it, felt it and survived it, you have a choice to make. You can let it boil inside you, let it become the lens through which you see everything else, let the person who hurt you continue to hurt you, year after year long after they've even forgotten your name. But you can do the harder thing. You can talk about it, until the words lose their venom. You can look directly at what happened and refused to let it own you.

It can even, and this is the part that seems impossible. Try to understand the person who did it. Not forgive necessarily, not forget, but understand. When Michael Thexton came home

“from Panam Flight 73, he would have to make a choice about what to do with what had happened”

to him. However, before that choice, he first had to survive. What was about to be an explosive

end to a siege that had lasted over 15 hours. Chapter 9, you could tell something was going to happen. Hello, I was actually asleep on the floor, to kill up on the floor and go to the young aggressive one, woke me up by kicking my feet. So that move, move. I'll pick myself up and stumble down the aisle again towards the economy class.

Michael walks toward the rear of the plane. He notices that it's far darker and stiflingly warm. As the ground power unit that is used to power the plane while on the ground was slowly shutting down. That's not supposed to run for 15 hours or whatever how long we've been there. It had broken down. So the plane was on battery power and all the electrics were faming very quickly. So the air conditioning had gone. The lights were going. The music had got blessed

stopped. And so I went through into the economy class. Everything was exactly as I had left it. I had sort of got this idea during the day that maybe they'd let the women and children up. But everybody was still there. Everybody was looking very scared. I saw a difference seat or window seat this time. Again, a few rows in front of the wing exit. And I went and slipped in there and got down low. And I thought, I'm back with the others. I stand a chance.

This is amazing. But you could tell that something was going to happen.

No, it was very tense. It got completely dark, completely quiet. And when the lights were completely out, again, people say that they were sort of, that the hijackers were shouting things

“to each other. I don't remember that. I only remember. Bang!”

And thinking is that hand grenade? Surely a hand grenade would be louder than that. And then unmistakably automatic gunfire from the front of the plane just a few yards away. The leader of the group had taken his weapon and unloaded an entire magazine into the

first few rows that were filled with terrified passengers. Then, more machine gunfire coming from

the very back of the plane. It was utter chaos on board as the terrorists had reached their braking point. And the mission had changed. And all that was left for them to do was try and kill as many people in that plane as they could. And then the leader has changed his magazines. We'll let's go the second magazine into the front of the plane and then from the back of the plane. They're apparently the marks or the evidence of six hand grenades thrown among the passengers.

The noise was deafening as grenades and machine gunfire competed against the screams and

everything fell eerily quiet.

“And I lifted my head enough to see, on the far side of the plane,”

door shaped blackness. No, it was different colour of black and it was door shaped. And I thought, I felt for the man beside me. I said, "They've got a door open. We've got to go." And he pushed me back and he said, "No, no, keep down. Keep down." I wasn't having this. I mean, I mean, I knew it would be fueled up to fly to Frankfurt. I thought it would burn. And I said, "No, it's on fire. You could smell smoke in there." I said, "We've got to go."

And so I pushed him out. He made his way to the far side, the starboard wing. I saw that the port wing exit was also open. And I got out apparently, I'm about the only person who got out that way. I don't know what, you know, somebody must have opened the door because I didn't. But there was no shoot. Every time you board a plane you hear it, that call from the flight attendance as the door closes.

“Door's to automatic. It's background noise, usually part of the ritual of flying, like the”

seatbelt demonstration and the safety card you never read. Most passengers don't even know what it means.

Well, it means the emergency slides are now armed. So, if those doors are open, the escape shoots deploy automatically. It means in an emergency there is a way out. But panam flight 73's doors were never set to automatic. When the hijack has stormed the plane, it of course had not gone through any of the pre-takeoff procedures. They were still commencing boarding. So, this meant the doors remained disarmed. So, when the shooting started, when the

chaos erupted and the passengers desperately tried to escape through the emergency exits, there was nothing on the other side. Just an over 20 foot drop to the time egg. A Michael standing on the wing in the dark. There's no way and God's earth on getting back on that plane. And so, I thought I'll slide off the back of the wing. I'll dangle from my fingertips and it can't be very far from that to the ground,

surely. You know, it was dark. And there's nothing to hang onto on the back of a jumbo jet wing.

You know, I can tell you that. You probably will never find that out from experience.

And so, I went off the back of that wing at some speed. And there's a moment in the air, you think, well, this is taking a little longer than I was expecting, you know, because it's a long way down. It's like jumping off the roof of the house. Not not out of the upstairs windows. It's a long way to the ground. But again, luck. You know, here are my 35 pounds underweight as fitters I'd ever been in my life wearing mountaineering boots. There are people who had

taken their shoes off on the plane to be comfortable during the day. Didn't put them back on again at the end. And they were jumping off the wings in bare feet. And there was some nasty injuries from that. But I landed in a heap on the ground, scratched my elbow on the tarmac,

“picked myself up and ran away. Again, I could remember looking back at the plane as I was running”

away from it, thinking, I'm going to wake up in a minute. I'll be back on the plane. But this is, this is the dream. But that's the reality. I can't possibly not be on that plane.

Thankfully, he wasn't dreaming. And he was running to the first building he could see.

And as he got closer, he spots a number of people who had also managed to escape and more began to congregate. And somebody said, "I'll follow me." And we ran through and capping the buildings and found ourselves in an enclosed courtyard, you know, like a nightmare with a bogey men behind us. And we all piled into a store-covered through a doorway. I must have been first in because I ended up sitting at the back wall with a little flight attendant sitting on my feet. And she turned to me.

And she said, "I'm very sorry. I'm pissing in my panties." I said, "I'll be so, you know, no problem." And we sat there. I don't know for half an hour, some time listening to noises, which we could not interpret outside. But basically not really wanting anybody to come and knock on the door, particularly anybody in a security guards uniform. But eventually somebody came and hammered on the door. We opened the door and it was the real army. And they took us back the terminal building,

which was chaos. The Pakistani officials had been putting together a plan to storm the plane. However, everything had suddenly kicked off before they were ready to go. They prepared for this scenario of going in, guns, blazing, but seemingly hadn't planned for what they were going to do with the hostages when they got them off of the plane. All of them having just been through

milling around, but quite sure what to do or where to go.

“Three of the hijackers tried to mingle with the passengers and were picked up and taken aside”

because basically rescued from a lynch mob because the passengers recognised them, even if nobody

asked it. Eventually, I met up with a couple of other Englishmen, one of whom I recognised from his passport photograph, which I'd been looking at all day thinking, "Why is he not? Where I am?" And the three of us went off in a taxi to the Sheraton Hotel and spent the night there. Well, I was able finally to place a phone call to my parents and say, "I'm alive. I don't know if you have any idea that I might not be, but I did get through a message around about

midnight Pakistan time to them to say that I was okay." Chapter 10. It's good to hear your voice. I remember you well. What's the sort of aftermath from something as horrific as that? You know, I can't even imagine even wanting to get anywhere near an airplane again for a long time. I mean, obviously you want to get home. You don't want to be there anymore. You've got to get back on an airplane. I mean,

“that must just be terrifying to think you have to get back on a plane.”

So, Sunday, that was a Friday. Saturday was spent sort of talking to the world's press who arrived and putting ourselves back together. Amazingly, getting my hand luggage back, the local consoles office was sort of trying to get stuff out of the plane and give it to people that belonged to. I got my passport back. And then on Sunday morning, there was a rumor that Panam had sent a plane. Everything very disorganized still. So, somebody had laid on a bus and

the people in the Sheridan went to the airport and there was this long lines of people trying

to check it. But basically nobody had to take it. Quite a lot of people didn't have their

passports. Nobody had any luggage. Quite a lot of people weren't there because they were injured. They were twenty dead. They were people who didn't want to go anywhere. They were perhaps going back to Mumbai. But there were a lot of people who were going to try and continue this journey to Frankfurt. And we were all frightened and we hadn't got our papers and the world's press walking up and down the lines interviewing people. Eventually after about three hours, Michael and the rest of the

passengers were checked in and led to the plane that would be taking them home. Another Panamerican Airlines 747, eerily sitting in the same spot that they had been held captive only hours before. And we got on the plane and I went upstairs and I was sitting in the upstairs bit behind the cockpit sitting next to the flight engineer from our the original flight. And I mean a couple of details, you know, they made an announcement saying, ladies and gentlemen, there will be free drink

for everybody. And I thought two things first, I paid for free drink, you know, I'm really unhappy about that. And I have had a drink for, you know, two months. I cannot basically be so pissed that I

“didn't fall over in front of the British press. I can't do that. So I had I think I had one drink”

of the entire journey home. But then they made an announcement, ladies and gentlemen, we know that, you know, some of you are injured and if anybody's frightened or hurt, we have doctors on board. The story was that the plane took off, somebody downstairs, you know, lean back to relax and three doctors rushed forward to try and revive him, you know, and that probably meant that he had may have had hard time.

Needless to say, it was certainly not a relaxing flight. And Michael says, he never felt truly

safe until such time as he arrived back in London and he was greeted by a rather grumpy British police officer and he simply thought, I'm home. So I mean, there is that relief of being home and you've come out of this with your life, obviously intact, which is fantastic. Was there any remnants from that moving forward, you know, was there any issues that you talked with?

Oh, I mean, I probably thought about it every day, but two years.

except occasionally, sort of loud noise went off. It would just always be running through my mind.

And that took probably two years before that stopped, you know, these days I don't think about it at all, you know, for weeks on end. Until someone like me calls you.

“What's that? Until someone like you calls me, you know, the thing, I think the thing that was”

that I was very lucky about, because I had been central, everybody wanted me to tell the story, including not just the journalists who want the blood and guts and exciting bits, but it's not about the, you know, how it started and how it finished. It's about thinking then to die for 12 hours and seeing no possibility, but anything else will happen.

That has an effect, but people who deal with crises wanted me to tell them the story and

they wanted all of that. You know, so I spent years talking to people who train cabin crew, talking to people who train commandos, talking particularly to police negotiators who, you know, stand outside these scenes with a megaphone. And the interesting thing about that was, I would do this talk with one of the other people who was on the plane, and we would sit there and tell this story at the end of week one of the two week course. And people in the class

would sit there just sort of open mouths, because they had spent week one on the theory. And this was suddenly sort of saying, oh my god, you know, this is, this is what it's about. It was just to make it real for these people. And, and that there was, I did, this course happened at Henden Police College in London four times a year, and I did 93 of them in a row. And so, you know, there was a time where if you were in a siege in the UK, you would be helped out by

somebody who had heard my story. But it's been a little while since the last time I went there. But because I got to talk about it, you know, that was sort of my therapy. Psychiatric. Yeah. I mean, my, my other show, I talked to men and women who are incarcerated in the United States, and a lot of them retell these horrific stories that they've been through. And a lot of said, the talking actually helps and to actually kind of live in, I suppose you,

as you said, you would probably relive this story more than anyone on that plane. So you've been able to sort of get it off your chest, essentially.

“Absolutely. And I think, you know, that was particularly brought home that in 2001,”

the Pakistanis released the leader on parole. They deported him, and he was immediately picked up by the FBI and taken to America where they proposed to put him on trial. I mean, he was released in September 2001, just after 1911, very bad time for a hijacker of an American plane to be at large in the world. And so George W. Bush was able to say, "Well, we caught this guy, you know, we're going to put him on trial." In 2003, the American authorities would get in touch

with those who were on board that flight in 1986 to inform them that the ringleader would be going on trial in the United States and would they first like to write a victim impact statement. And secondly, did they agree with the death penalty? Because this was the punishment, the man was facing. [Music]

I don't approve of the death penalty. I always had it, I think it's wrong and barbaric. But for many

years, I had thought, in his case, I would make an exception, because what he did was so horrific

“that the only thing that would recognise how serious it was would be the death penalty. And then”

they asked me, as if my opinion mattered, and that's a different sort of question. And I said, well, let me thought about it deeply again. I don't think you should have the death penalty, because that would make him a martyr. By 2004, he would go to trial. The Michael is well as the others from that day, again, are contacted. And 2004, then they said, "We're going to put him on trial and the judge has asked for witnesses to be in the court. Will you come to Washington?"

And sit there in the courtroom and tell us your story. And again, I had to go. No, it was almost like having to go to Broad Peak to say goodbye to people. I had to go and see him. The courtroom was packed that day. There was around 25 people who were on the plane or relatives of people who had died that day. And of course, Michael was also there. People like Vera after Roga,

spoken about it. The last six people to speak, all members of the same family, mother who built the plane with her two tiny children, the father who stayed at home in America with two

“other children. And Mrs. Hussain, the last witness to speak, she spoke. I think for two and a half hours,”

and she had never spoken about it before. To anybody, not to her family. She said, "When we

asked to make these victim impact statements, we emailed them to each other, even though we live in the same house." And I mean, it was raw and it was brutal. What she had gone through and what all these other people. And I realized, you know, how lucky I had been to have been able to speak about this so many times to people who were interested in it. And I felt much more at peace with the whole thing than all of these people. And he was given a sentence of 160 years, which is almost

medieval, somehow. The logic of it is that you be eligible for parole after a third of your sentence. So they said three life sentences plus 25 years. That means you've got to be dead before an energy roll. Nevertheless, he does have parole hearings. I don't know how they work that out. And every time he has parole hearing, the Department of Justice turns up to object to it and say, "No, he's supposed to be here for life." And that is where he is. He's in a federal prison

in America. And the others, his colleagues, when they found out what had happened to him, they were all eligible for all as well in Pakistan. But they said for a while, actually, we'd rather just stay here. We'd rather be in a Pakistani jail than in an American one. And then Pakistan in America fell out of love with each other a bit. And they were quietly released. And nobody is absolutely sure exactly where in the world they

are. They still have a price on their head. And that was that. The man who had held a gun to Michael's head in the doorway of a Boeing 747, who had killed innocent people, was essentially

given his own death sentence. But his wouldn't be carried out in a split second. His death sentence

would continue until the day he died behind bars. In situations like these, survivors are left with unanswered questions that linger for years, sometimes forever. Why? Why did you hurt me? Why did you kill my brother, my sister, my mother,

“my father, or in Michael's case, why didn't you kill me? Why didn't you shoot me in that doorway?”

As you had the man just moments before, why didn't you pull the trigger when you had every reason in your mind to do so? These questions tend to haunt survivors. They echo in quite moments. They shape how you see the world, how you sleep at night, and how you move through your life.

The most people never get the answers. But in another incredible turn of events,

Michael would to get the chance to ask those very questions. To the man who once stood behind him, the gun to his head. Yeah, yeah, this was this extraordinary thing that the beginning of the pandemic, somebody got in touch with me and said, "We're making a film. We're going to make a documentary about this project." That was one of those sort of weird things in the pandemic. I had

odd dreams. I thought, "That's got to be a dream." Who on earth, in 2020, is going to make a film about a 1986 hijack. But it was, so, and over the next couple of years, I had various, I was interviewed by the television crew, and then one day the director came to me and he said, "Look, you said, this is for you to think about, but I have been in touch with the terrorist in his American jail." And he said, "He would talk to you if you wanted to ask him questions. You can talk

him on the phone." And again, I thought about it a lot, but I had to say, "Yes, I have questions.

“I have questions that I want to ask him." And I didn't think he would answer them honestly.”

In the immediate aftermath of what had happened and in later trials of these men, they in fact denied shooting anyone. They made up some cock and ball story that it was the Pakistani commanders who stormed the plane and unleashed a hail of bullets and explosives,

board that plane at all. So, they had always denied wrongdoing. But nonetheless, even though Michael

didn't think he would get the answers he was after, he was going to ask the questions. And so, this extraordinary thing that I'm standing in my own kitchen, holding the directors, mobile phone in my hand, waiting for a phone call, and the phone rang, and it's it's Zayt Safarini.

“And he said, "Mike, it's good to hear your voice. I remember you well." I said, "Look,”

I don't know how long we've got, but I have some questions. Is that okay?" said, "Oh, anything, anything." I said, "Well, why didn't you shoot me? At the end, you know, why did you put me back with the others?" And he said, "Oh, it was, it was what you said about your brother, he died or something." He said, "It touched my heart, and I thought, just sit aside, man." And over the years, you know, I had a number of theories about this, you know, and the main one,

I'd always thought, was the fact that, you know, they called for a Brit, and they expected

some Brit fat Westerner to come for. They got somebody who looked worse fed than any of them. And they just sort of, they, they couldn't find the enemy that they were prepared to hate.

“But the idea that he had actually taken any notice of what I said about my brother,”

at the moment when I thought he was too busy, and remembered it 12 hours later, and remembered it more than 30 years later. It's not literally true to say that my brother saved my life, but it's sort of, it's sort of poetic like that. But totally. That was, you know, the circularity, began with Pete. Exactly. And obviously, you know, we've spoken about this, you know,

then talking about it, and all this. And you don't think about it anymore. I suppose, would you consider you've come away from it quite unscathed? Well, you know, I couldn't have it differently. You know, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody as a way, but it's a part of my life.

“It's a very big part of my life, really, that I was the man who was hijacked. I was the man”

the man they didn't shoot. And it has affected me in so many ways. You know, I have a, I have a very well developed sense of proportion. There are things that matter and things that

don't matter. And I can always tell myself, you know, I shouldn't be here. Therefore, I shouldn't be

annoyed at what this murdering could be. And sort of lastly, I mean, you know, speaking about your brother, it started with your brother and it kind of ended with your brother. If you ever thought what he may have thought of all of this craziness that came out of is little less adventurous brother ending up in this incredible situation. He would have been surprised. He had a wicked sense of humor. He would have thought it was all quite funny. It's, I mean, one of the things that's

quite nice is to be able to introduce my children to the uncle they never had. And also my nephews and nieces, because he would have been he would have been a weird uncle. But this enables them to see who he was. Well, I was going to say it's kind of in a way to, it's, it's been a supposed a nice way to memorialize him, I guess. You know, he's memory. Yeah, it was the picture of a memorial expedition. Yeah. And he's, he got his memorial. It didn't even

what. Michael Féxton survived a situation that was completely out of his control. He was in the hands of men from another country with a different culture and who spoke another language. But thankfully, it was a situation that would end after hours. But what if you find yourself in another country, we don't know the culture, you don't speak the language and your audio could see you stuck not for hours, days, weeks or even months.

But years. Now, as you can get a liar first before you make a statement or you make it, you know, there you've got to make a statement and they were right. You stopped down in India and I don't know what they're writing. Badshouse was an everyday blue collar worker from the UK and he would find that out firsthand while he was finalizing the details of having his own dream holiday home in India. It soon turned into a nightmare. I was only sentenced after three years a month and that

would last ten years. There's two hundred and twenty men in that time. Deary man. He's six

“times, it's only three work and a stink and you know, a few rarely funds and you can imagine”

the heat. Yeah, it was very, very out to adults. Next time, on what I survived.

I'm looking at the moon in the sky. The shooting calm as a surprise but I can't sleep.

“Or in my mind, I'm trying to fight war in my mind. I don't know who's the winner tonight but”

today.