Daman Kumar Soni was sitting next to Rupin Katyal when the stabbings began. Satnam Singh was in the seat directly behind Katyal. As the flight had made its way towards Amritsar, the flight purser had been shifted to the twenty-fourth row. The hijackers had picked out eight well-built passengers, summoning them by crooking their fingers and making them get up. Daman Kumar Soni was among them. One at a time, they were asked to move to the executive class cabin where they were made to sit down, tightly belted in, and with their seats reclined. "When I walked into the executive class, I saw an open bag with what looked like yellow nylon rope in it," Soni says. "I wondered what it was for." He was soon to find out. The rope was used to tie the wrists of all the eight passengers who were belted into the seats in the executive class cabin. "They looked like handcuffs," remembers Soni. Among those who were handcuffed with them was a man called Chander Chhabra, a honeymooner whose name was Garg, at least another Indian in his thirties, and a foreigner with a beard and long hair who was blindfolded.

In the cockpit, when the countdown began, bits of it could be heard through the cockpit door. "As it progressed, Soni saw his life flash before his eyes. "It was excruciating. An image of my family deity flashed before me. I thought we were all going to die. It was a hopeless situation." From the front, they could hear shouts: "Pilot, plane udao, plane udao (Fly the aircraft)."

Loud, angry exchanges emanating from the cockpit and outside its door punctuated the air. A hijacker, later identified by the passengers as Doctor, came rushing up with a small knife, no larger than those used in a kitchen, to the rows where the passengers were tied down. "He started stabbing Rupin, hitting him repeatedly at least 20-25 times. It was all so fast, it looked like he was pounding a roll of dough."

Doctor then went towards the cockpit door but came back and once more began to assault the mild-mannered Katyal with the small knife. He then moved to the seat behind him and began to attack Satnam Singh. While everyone else stayed quiet, Chander Chhabra began to plead for mercy. Doctor aimed a kick at his face to silence him. Another foreigner, a Belgian, was also struck. Blood was soon dripping down the seats and on to the floor. t

(Excerpted from IC814 Hijacked! by Anil K Jagga and Saurabh Shukla, Lotus 2000)