Disgruntled flier sparks bomb, hijack scare

NEWDELHI/MUMBAI: A disgruntled passenger, purportedly seeking “revenge” against Jet Airways, threatened to hijack and blow up a Mumbai-Delhi flight on Monday morning, resulting in high drama in the skies and across Air Traffic Control (ATC) towers in three cities.

Jet’s Flight 9W-339, with 122 people on board including seven crew members, made an emergency landing in Ahmedabad after a member of the cabin crew found a note in the toilet that said the plane had highjackers on board and a bomb was planted in its cargo hold, officials said.

The Boeing 737-900 aircraft, which departed from Mumbai airport at 3 am, according to Jet Airways records, was due to land in New Delhi at 5 am. It was instead taken to an isolated bay in the Ahmedabad airport around 3:55 am, where it was searched by a Quick Response Team (QRT) under the guidance of an emergency anti-hijacking committee.

At 12:21 pm, union civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Rao tweeted that the person behind the note had been found. “I am advising the airlines to put him on the No-fly list immediately, in addition to other statutory criminal action,” he said.

The passenger, Birju Salla, a 36-year-old businessman from Mumbai, said he was angry and wanted to get back at Jet because, he alleged, he was served a meal with a cockroach in it on board a Mumbai-Rajkot flight in July 2016, according to the police.

Jet Airways sources, however, said their inquiry at the time had concluded that Salla, who is a member of the airline’s frequent flier programme, had put the insect in his own meal.

The letter that Salla left in the lavatory was written in English and in Arabic, for which, airport security officials said, Salla had used Google Translate. Though the note warned that “if you put landing gear, you will hear the noise of people dying ”, the pilot decided to land the plane at the nearest airport, Ahmedabad. This was done because, while there was a note, there was no visible threat, the officials added.

The pilot followed standard protocol to alert the Ahmedabad ATC tower, which cleared him for landing. The ATC then escalated the matter to its control room, which began the procedure for the formation of a state-level threat assessment committee, as per the government’s standard operating procedure in such a scenario. The letter, which the committee declared a “specific threat”, also warned that the “cargo area contains explosive bomb and wl blast if you land in Delhi.” The note asked for the aircraft to be taken “directly to POK”. It wasn’t immediately clear what Salla planned to do then. The anti-hijacking committee asked for the plane to be taken to an isolated bay on the Ahmedabad tarmac. “The aircraft landed without incident… and was parked at a remote bay, where all 115 guests and seven crew members were safely deplaned,” Jet Airways said in a statement.

Other passengers HT spoke to said they had no idea what had happened while the aircraft was in the air, and realised they had landed in Ahmedabad only after the pilot made an announcement once they had touched down.

Nothing suspicious was found in the cabin, or in the check-in luggage of anyone on board, security officials said, adding that the only baggage considered “doubtful” was cleared after the “suspicious” items it contained were found to be masala and pickle.