NEW DELHI: Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah has said he didn’t feel that Lal Krishna Advani was in favour of releasing the terrorists during the IC-814 aircraft hijack in 1999, adding it seemed that the then deputy prime minister was being pushed into it.
“Let me be very honest, from Advani ji's voice, I felt he wasn’t in favour of this. I felt that he was pushed into it,” Abdullah said while speaking at a book release function.
Abdullah also said that the release had shown India as a ‘weak nation’.
Air India flight IC-814, which was enroute from Kathmandu to New Delhi, was hijacked by the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen terrorist group in 1999 and taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan via New Delhi and Amritsar.
The crisis lasted for a week and ended after India agreed to release three militants - Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Maulana Masood Azhar.