Showing posts with label TERRORISM. Show all posts

Saturday, January 14, 2017

TERRORISM The Profile Of an Urban And Educated Jihadists Of South Asia (r)

SOURCE:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/13012017-the-urban-and-educated-jihadists-of-south-asia-analysis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29

The Profile Of an Urban

&

Educated JihadistsOf South Asia

By

Abdul Basit*

Dhakka Bangladesh

BY RSIS JANUARY 13, 2017

Contrary to popular perception that the jihadists in South Asia come from poor socio- economic backgrounds with madrasah education, a new breed of educated and urban militants with the urge for a sense of belonging has emerged in the region. The desire to create a global Sunni caliphate, among other factors, has contributed to their violent-radicalisation.

Traditionally jihadists in South Asia have been associated with militant organisations like the Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Indian Mujahideen (IM) and Harkatul Jihadul Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B). These jihadist outfits recruited people from the rural and poor socio-economic backgrounds with madrasah education.

Contrary to these perceptions, in the last two years, a new breed of educated jihadists from urban middle and upper middle class has emerged in South Asia. This breed of South Asian jihadists is manifested in self-radicalised cells and lone-wolf individuals.

Driving Factor: Double Alienation

For instance, the pro-IS cell in Karachi that targeted members of the Ismaili Shia community in Karachi in May 2014 and the five-member cell which carried out the Holey Artisan Bakery attack in Dhaka in July 2016 were educated scions of rich families. More recently, the terrorists who targeted the Quetta police-training academy in Balochistan were college and university educated students except for the suicide bomber who was a madrasah student.

Similarly, in November last year, Sri Lanka’s Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe briefed the parliament that 32 Sri Lankan Muslims from well-educated and elite families joined Islamic State in Syria. Likewise, the aspiring jihadists who travelled to Syria and Iraq from India had educated and urban backgrounds.

The path to violent-extremism of these jihadists has been paved by an identity crisis, quest for a sense of belonging, a struggle for recognition and resentment towards their respective states due to unemployment, corruption, and bad governance. They suffer a double alienation: from the irresponsive states failing them as citizens and societies where a lack of consensus on what constitutes a ‘good Muslim’ pushes them to extremist discourses for answers. This set of grievances falls within the broader parameters of contemporary

Political Islam and the Salafist narrative.

Traditionally, the Jihadist and sectarian organisations in South Asia have been grassroots movements linked to madrasahs and mosque networks whose target audience remained poor and lower-income class segments of the society. Meanwhile the educated middle- and upper-middle class sections of urban areas have been targeted by evangelical and missionary organisations like Hizbut Tahrir, Al-Huda and Tanzeem-e-Islami whose teachings and lectures revolve around contemporary discourses on political Islam.

Three Reasons

Three reasons account for the emergence of educated and urban militants in South Asia. Firstly, the deeper Internet penetration and the onset of social media that has decreased the distance between local and global developments, accelerated the flow of communication, democratised violence and eroded states’ monopoly on information. The unregulated cyber space in South Asia of 480 million users is the second largest in the world. IS has exploited it to further its ideological narrative. This has had a huge impact on patterns of violent-extremism and terrorism.

The IS’ ability to universalise local grievances in its meta-narrative of global-jihad and offer a putative solution in the revival of the so-called Caliphate has resonated with some of the educated population in urban areas. Other than addressing individual grievances, such rhetoric also provided them with a stronger sense of belonging and empowerment.

Secondly, the lower-threshold of radicalisation and violence because of IS’ violent and cinematic tactics has also played a critical role in mobilising the South Asian-educated and urban youth. They may have harboured radical thoughts but they did not find Al Qaeda and its associates’ jihadist platforms attractive. IS’ radical message provided them an alternative jihadist platform to create a global “Sunni Caliphate” and a spiritual fight for the glory of Islam.

Thirdly, the generational shift undergone by social, political and religious movements creating a rift between the old and the new generations. This rift can lead to the creation of splinter factions by the young and rebellious membership impatient and hungry for change and driven by grand ambitions while the older generation is seen as status quo-oriented and rigid.

Traits and Characteristics of Urban Jihadists

Characteristically, this generation of South Asian urban militants is tech and media savvy, compared to the traditional South Asian jihadists, and has Salafi-Takfiri leanings.

Most of the militants of this generation are between 18-30 years and they have gone through a relatively shorter period of radicalisation. They all seem to be obsessed with ideas of the so-called Caliphate, hijrah and the end-times narratives.

It is extreme in its methods, unapologetically brutal and morally consequentialist: for them the ends justify the means.

In the rapidly changing global and regional environment, especially the reshaping of the Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East arising from civil wars in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, the disaffected and disfranchised Muslim youth in South Asia are facing an ideological dilemma. This unique challenge, in addition to operational and traditional law enforcement responses, requires counter-narrative and counter-ideological responses.

The existing policy frameworks for counter-terrorism and extremism will have to be revised in line with the evolving trends and patterns. However, the counter-ideological components within the broader Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) frameworks do not need to borrow foreign concepts. The answers to the ideological threat are local and enshrined within the pacifist tradition of Sufi Islam in South Asia.

Sufi Islam promotes communal and sectarian tolerance and preaches peaceful-co-existence which needs to be promoted and strengthened. The concept is indigenous to the South Asian socio-cultural milieu and political environment.

*Abdul Basit is an Associate Research Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

RSIS

RSIS Commentaries are intended to provide timely and, where appropriate, policy relevant background and analysis of contemporary developments. The views of the author/s are their own and do not represent the official position of the S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, which produces the Commentaries.

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

TRERRORISM : TERRORISM IN SOUTH ASIA : THE TALIBAN

SOURCE:

http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-organizations-and-networks/taliban/p35985?cid=marketing_use-taliban_infoguide-012115&cid=nlc-dailybrief-daily_news_brief--link19-20160405&sp_mid=51080421&sp_rid=YmN2YXN1bmRocmFAaG90bWFpbC5jb20S1#!/p35985?cid=nlc-dailybrief-daily_news_brief--link19-20160405&sp_mid=51080421&sp_rid=YmN2YXN1bmRocmFAaG90bWFpbC5jb20S1

THE TALIBAN

A CFR InfoGuide Presentation

The Taliban has outlasted the world’s most potent military forces and its two main factions now challenge the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. As U.S. troops draw down, the next phase of conflict will have consequences that extend far beyond the region.

The Taliban was toppled in Afghanistan in 2001 for harboring al-Qaeda, but it has not been defeated. With an estimated core of up to sixty thousand fighters, the Taliban remains the most vigorous insurgent group in Afghanistan and holds sway over civilians near its strongholds in the country’s south and east. It has also metastasized in neighboring Pakistan, where thousands of fighters in the country’s western tribal areas wage war against the government. Now, as the international combat mission in Afghanistan closes, the Taliban threatens to destabilize the region, harbor terrorist groups with global ambitions, and set back human rights and economic development in the areas where it prevails.

Though the Taliban appears unlikely to dismantle the Afghan government and revive its emirate, it poses the most serious challenge to Kabul’s authority even as the United States winds down the longest war in its history and NATO scales back its largest-ever deployment outside of Europe. The insurgents’ resilience calls into question a state-building project that has cost its international backers hundreds of billions of dollars.

The U.S.-led military coalition has suffered nearly 3,500 dead and more than ten thousand wounded. Since 2001, at least twenty-one thousand Afghan civilians have been killed in conflict, and three million people have been displaced, according to the UN refugee agency. Afghan troops and police are dying at their highest rates ever.

The drawdown of international forces from Afghanistan also raises questions about Pakistan’s strategy in South Asia and its leverage over the Afghan Taliban. The insurgents could not have thrived without sanctuary in Pakistan, whose main intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, cultivated them in the 1990s and maintained ties to them after 2001 (PDF). Pakistan has long sought what its military doctrines call strategic depth: an amicable regime in Kabul, to avoid being encircled by its chief rival, India, to the east, and a pro-India Afghanistan to the west.

Along with several foreign militant groups, Pakistani Taliban factions thrived in the sanctuaries along the frontier that the Pakistani military had set aside for the Afghan Taliban. But Pakistan does not control the Islamist militancy it helped enable, and its military is now fighting a movement whose primary aim differs from that of the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban has declared Islamabad apostate for aligning itself with post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and seeks revolution in Pakistan. Under the umbrella Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or Taliban Movement of Pakistan), these militants have attacked Pakistani security forces and civilians nationwide.

Thousands of Sunni Islamic militants have established rudimentary bases along the Afghan-Pakistani border. There, they harbor al-Qaeda and affiliated jihadi groups and provide staging grounds for cross-border attacks against international troops and Afghan security forces. The India-oriented terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which launched the 2008 attack on the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai and is believed to have ties to the ISI, has found refuge there, as has the anti-Shia group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. These groups are suspected by Western intelligence and Afghan officials of carrying out attacks in Afghanistan, including on U.S. and Indian targets.

In June 2013, Afghan forces assumed responsibility from the international coalition for providing security, a prerequisite for the drawdown of tens of thousands of U.S.-led troops. Also in 2014, a presidential election brought the country’s first peaceful and democratic, if flawed, transfer of power. These developments might undercut the Taliban's claim to mount the preeminent resistance to foreign occuption, but the Taliban justifies the continuation of its armed campaign by asserting the government is illegitimate and un-Islamic, a puppet of the West.

Meanwhile, the persistence of ineffective, corrupt, and often-mistrusted state institutions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, combined with mutual mistrust between the two countries, could give Taliban guerrillas an outsized impact on both countries' security, development, and democratization after the drawdown

We believe the war in Afghanistan will come to an end when all foreign invaders pull out of Afghanistan and a holy Islamic and independent regime prevails here.

The Afghan Taliban’s 2014 Eid al-Fitr Communiqué

The Rise of the Islamic Emirate

Anarchy prevailed in Afghanistan in 1994. The Soviet Union's Red Army had pulled out five years prior, and international support for the anti-Soviet jihad, led by U.S. and Saudi intelligence operatives, waned soon after. Afghanistan, awash in arms, had neither a functioning government nor a productive economy. In the post-Soviet power vacuum, mujahadeen, warlords who had made common cause against Soviet forces, jockeyed for power and spoils, and the government led by the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan collapsed in 1992. Civil war engulfed Afghanistan, leaving appalling carnage but no clear victor.

A small clerical movement emerged to protect residents from the banditry and extortion that had become routine. These vigilantes in western Kandahar called themselves the Taliban, Pashto for “seekers of knowledge.” Their ranks were soon reinforced by thousands of their co-ethnics, Pashtuns educated in Deobandi madrassas, or seminaries, along Pakistan’s western frontier. These madrassas proliferated under President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (1977–88) and served some of the millions of Afghan refugees who had been displaced by more than a decade of unrest. They were sponsored by the religious party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami (JUI), which mobilized its students to take up arms with the Taliban.

The Taliban was welcomed by a war-weary public as it expanded out from Kandahar. The movement established order on the basis of Hanafi Islamic jurisprudence influenced by Pashtun custom, which meshed with the rural mores of southern Afghanistan.

Pakistan assumed a crucial role in cultivating the Taliban. Under the command of Mullah Mohammad Omar, an Afghan ethnic Pashtun who had served as a junior mujahadeen commander during the anti-Soviet jihad, the Taliban swept through southern Afghanistan in 1994. The ISI shifted its support from the major mujahadeen party it had bet on to Mullah Omar's group. Pakistan believed that with ideological and material means of persuasion, including funds and arms, it could manipulate Taliban clerics and thus ensure a stable and acquiescent Afghanistan, as well as secure routes to open trade to the newly independent Central Asian states, writes journalist Ahmed Rashid.

Another outside force of looming importance for Afghanistan was al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi who had bankrolled and facilitated fighters known as the Afghan Arabs during the anti-Soviet fight, was expelled from Sudan in 1996. He returned to Afghanistan seeking a sanctuary from which he could build up his terrorist group. Mullah Omar protected bin Laden even as the al-Qaeda leader’s international fugitive status grew over the late 1990s. Bin Laden provided resources and technical capacities to the Taliban, and Mullah Omar was won over by his claim to be a righteous mujahid and revolutionary icon, according to researchers who study the Taliban. Some analysts also attribute Mullah Omar's offer of refuge to bin Laden, despite an international bounty, to the obligation under pashtunwali (PDF), the pre-Islamic tribal code, to provide guests unconditional hospitality. (Many members of the Taliban later faulted Mullah Omar’s protection of bin Laden for the U.S.-led invasion that toppled their state.)

Pakistan's ISI likely approved of or facilitated bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan, the congressionally mandated 9/11 Commission found, since some of its Islamist militant proxies who were oriented toward jihad in India-administered Kashmir trained in bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan.

Once the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, it declared Afghanistan an Islamic emirate and Mullah Omar its head of state and installed clerics to helm national institutions. With an emphasis on policing morality, the Taliban established the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which attempted to enforce its puritanical interpretation of sharia. Police beat Afghans who defied the Taliban’s edicts and mores, including those mandating full beards for men and head-to-toe burqas for women. The Taliban shuttered girls’ schools and forbade women from working, so many women widowed during the anti-Soviet jihad were forced to beg in the streets and many schools were closed for lack of teachers.

By 1998, the Taliban had come to control 90 percent of the country. After nearly two decades of conflict, resources were scarce and Afghanistan remained at the lowest rungs of global human development rankings. Under protocol with the Taliban, the United Nations ran a country-wide humanitarian program in Afghanistan, but came at loggerheads with the regime over restrictions it imposed in the name of Islamization. Taliban-governed Afghanistan became an international pariah for its human rights abuses and refusal to surrender bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda on international watch lists.

The Taliban’s severe strictures were alien to many Afghans, and after the Taliban captured Kabul, the Northern Alliance became Afghanistan's main military and political opposition. The alliance, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, drew its support mainly from the ethnic Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara communities. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were the only states to recognize the Taliban regime, and the Northern Alliance held Afghanistan's seat at the United Nations.

Pressed into a small corner of northern and northeastern Afghanistan, Massoud’s alliance struggled to hold out against the Taliban from 1998 to 2001. Assisting their Taliban protectors, al-Qaeda agents assassinated Massoud two days before the 9/11 attacks that would quickly end the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

TERRORISM : Pan Am Flight 73

SOURCE:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_American_World_Airways

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For the Lockerbie bombing, see Pan Am Flight 103.

**Pan Am Flight 73**
Hijacking summary
A similar aircraft in 1985
Date	September 5, 1986
Summary	Hijacking
Site	Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan
Passengers	361
Crew	19
Injuries (non-fatal)	120
Fatalities	20
Survivors	360
Aircraft type	Boeing 747-121
Aircraft name	Clipper Empress of the Seas
Operator	Pan American World Airways
Registration	N656PA
Flight origin	Sahar International Airport Mumbai, India
Stopover	Jinnah International Airport Karachi, Pakistan
Last stopover	Frankfurt am Main Airport Frankfurt am Main, West Germany
Destination	John F. Kennedy Int'l Airport New York, United States

Pan Am Flight 73, a Pan American World Airways Boeing 747-121, was hijacked on September 5, 1986, while on the ground at Karachi, Pakistan, by four armed Palestinian men of the Abu Nidal Organization. The aircraft, with 360 passengers on board, had just arrived from Sahar International Airport in Mumbai, India, and was preparing to depart Jinnah International Airport in Karachi for Frankfurt Airport in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, ultimately continuing on to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, United States.^[1] A June 2001 grand jury charged that the militants were planning to use the hijacked plane to pick up Palestinian prisoners in both Cyprus and Israel.^[2] However, in 2006, surviving hostage Michael Thexton published a book^[3] in which he claimed he had heard the hijackers intended to crash the plane into a target in Israel (in the manner of 9/11).^[4]
Twenty of the passengers were killed during the hijacking; twelve of them were from India and the rest were from the United States, Pakistan, and Mexico. All the hijackers were arrested and sentenced to death in Pakistan. However, the sentences were later commuted to life in prison against the wishes of India and the United States. Neerja Bhanot, head attendant on the flight, gave her life up to save 360 others. She first hid the passports of American passengers so that they could not be distinguished from non-Americans. This was because the hijackers decided to take the passports of all passengers in order to identify the American citizens present and make them targets. 17 hours later, the hijackers opened fire on passengers and planted explosives, at which point Bhanot opened an emergency exit to let the passengers through. She was fatally shot while sending a group of children off the plane before her.^[5]

[hide]

Hijacking at Karachi, Pakistan[edit]

The incident began as passengers boarded the Frankfurt-bound aircraft in Karachi. A subsequent CIA investigation revealed that the hijack occurred despite the presence of armed agents near the aircraft. The four hijackers were dressed as Karachi airport security guards and were armed with assault rifles, pistols, grenades, and plastic explosive belts. At about 6:00 a.m. local time, the hijackers drove a van that had been modified to look like an airport security vehicle through a security checkpoint up to one of the boarding stairways to Pan Am Flight 73.

The hijackers stormed up the stairways into the plane, fired shots from an automatic weapon, and seized control of the aircraft. Neerja Bhanot was able to alert the cockpit crew using intercom, allowing the pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer to flee through an overhead hatch in the cockpit.^[6] This was to prevent the hijackers forcing the plane to take off. The plane was effectively grounded at the airport.

Safarini takes control[edit]

This section possibly contains original research. Relevant discussion may be found on Talk:Pan Am Flight 73. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (August 2013)

Within a short time after seizing control of the aircraft, hijacker Zayd Safarini realized that the crew had escaped off the plane and therefore he would be forced to negotiate with officials. First and business class passengers were ordered to go towards the back of the plane. At the same time, passengers at the back of the plane were ordered forward. Since the plane was nearly full, passengers sat down in the aisles, galleys and door exits. At approximately 10:00 a.m., Safarini then went through the plane and arrived at the seat of Rajesh Kumar, a 29-year-old Indian American resident of California who had recently been naturalized as an American citizen. Safarini ordered Kumar to come to the front of the aircraft, to kneel at the front doorway of the aircraft, and to face the front of the aircraft with his hands behind his head. He negotiated with officials, in particular Viraf Daroga, the head of Pan Am's Pakistan operation, that if the crew wasn't sent on the plane within 15 minutes then Kumar would be shot. Shortly thereafter, Safarini became impatient with the officials and grabbed Kumar and shot him in the head in front of witnesses both on and off the aircraft. Safarini then heaved Kumar out of the door onto the tarmac below. Pakistan personnel on the tarmac reported that Kumar was still breathing when he was placed in an ambulance, but he was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital in Karachi.

Safarini then joined the hijackers and ordered the flight attendants to collect the passports of all passengers. The flight attendants complied with this request, risking their own lives. During the collection of the passports, one stewardess, Neerja Bhanot, the senior attendant, believed passengers with American passports would be singled out by the hijackers. She proceeded to hide some of the American passports under a seat, and dumped the rest down a rubbish chute.

After the passports had been collected one of the crew members came onto the intercom and asked for Michael John Thexton, a British citizen, to come to the front of the plane. He then went through the curtain into the front of the plane where he came face to face with Safarini who was holding Thexton's passport. He then asked Thexton if he was a soldier and if he had a gun, Thexton replied "No". He then ordered Thexton onto his knees. Safarini then told the officials that if anyone came near the plane that he would go on to kill another passenger. Viraf Daroga then told Safarini that there was a crew member on board who was able to use the cockpit radio and asked him to negotiate through radio. Safarini then went back to Thexton and asked him whether he would like a drink of water, to which Thexton replied "Yes." Safarini also asked Thexton if he was married, and claimed he did not like all this violence and killing and said that the Americans and Israelis had taken over his country and left him unable to lead a proper life.

Then one of the hijackers ordered Thexton back through the plane to a seat. The hijack stalemate continued on into the night. During the stalemate, flight attendant Neerja Bhanot secretly removed a page from her manual that explained all the procedures for the 3R aircraft door and placed it inside of a magazine and then handed it to the passenger near the door. She instructed him to "read" the magazine and then close it up, but refer to it later if necessary. This page included information on how to open the exit door and deploy the slide down to the apron. About 9:00 p.m. the auxiliary power unit shut down, all lighting turned off, and emergency lights came on. Passengers at the front were ordered toward the back, while passengers at the back were ordered forward. Since the aisles were already full of passengers, those passengers standing just sat down.
With the plane out of power and sitting in near darkness a hijacker at the 1L door said a prayer and then aimed to shoot at the explosive belt the other hijacker at the 1R door was wearing. The intent was to cause an explosion massive enough to kill all passengers and crew on board, as well as themselves. Since the cabin was so dark, the hijacker missed, causing only a small detonation. Immediately the hijackers began shooting their weapons into the cabin at passengers and attempted to throw their grenades. Yet again the lack of light caused them to not pull pins fully and create small explosions. Ultimately, bullets created most damage since each bullet would bounce off the aircraft and create crippling shrapnel. The flight attendant at the 3L door decided it was time to take action and opened the door; although the slide did not deploy, several passengers and crew jumped down the fifteen feet to the tarmac. The passenger that was near 3R had read the page the flight attendant earlier gave him and was able to successfully open that door. It was the only door opened to have the slide deploy. Ultimately this slide allowed for more passengers to evacuate safely and without injuries. Neerja Bhanot assisted a number of passengers to escape from the flight, then she laid down her life shielding three children from the bullets fired by the terrorists. Twenty passengers were killed and over a hundred were injured.

Assault[edit]

Pakistan quickly sent in the Pakistan Army's Special Services Group (SSG) commandos and Pakistan Rangers were put on high-alert. The 16-hour long hijacking came to an end when the hijackers opened fire on the passengers at 9:30 p.m Pakistan Standard Time, but soon ran out of ammunition. resulting in some passengers fleeing the aircraft through the aircraft's emergency exits. The SSG responded by storming the aircraft and capturing the hijackers. The SSG commando unit was headed by Brigadier Tariq Mehmood and the Shaheen Company of the SSG's 1st Commando Battalion carried out the operation.^[7]

Passengers[edit]

The 380 total passengers plus crew on Pan Am 73 were citizens of 14 different countries. Citizens of India represented roughly 25% of the people on board the flight, and 65% of those killed

Nationalities[edit]

^{[citation needed]}

Nationality	Passengers	Crew	Total	Victims
Algeria	4	-	4
Belgium	2	-	2
Canada	30	-	30
Denmark	8	-	8
France	4	1	5
West Germany	81	3	84
India	91	8	99	13
Ireland	5	-	5
Italy	27	-	27
Mexico	8	-	8	2
Pakistan	44	-	44	3
Sweden	2	-	2
United Kingdom	15	4	19	1
United States	44	0	44	2
Total	361	19	380	20

Aftermath[edit]

Trial and sentencing[edit]

On July 6, 1988, five Palestinian men were convicted in Pakistan for their roles in the hijacking and murders and sentenced to death: Zayd Hassan Abd al-Latif Safarini, Wadoud Muhammad Hafiz al-Turki, Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, Muhammad Abdullah Khalil Hussain ar-Rahayyal, and Muhammad Ahmed al-Munawar.^[8] The sentences were later commuted to life in prison against the wishes of India and United States.

Safarini was handed over to FBI from a prison in Pakistan in September 2001.^[9] He was taken to the United States where on May 13, 2005 he was sentenced to a 160-year prison term.^[8] At the plea proceeding, Safarini admitted that he and his fellow hijackers committed the offenses as members of the Abu Nidal Organization, also called the ANO, a designated terrorist organization.

The other four prisoners have escaped from Adiala jail Rawalpindi, reportedly in January 2008.^[8]

Libyan involvement and legal action[edit]

Libya has been accused of sponsoring the hijacking, as well as carrying out the bombings of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 and UTA Flight 772 in 1989.

In August 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for "the actions of its officials" in respect of the bombing Pan Am Flight 103, but was silent on the question of the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking.^[10] Libya offered $2.7 billion USD in compensation to the families of the 270 victims of Pan Am Flight 103 and,^[10] in January 2004, agreed to pay $170 million to the families of the 170 UTA victims.^[11] The seven American UTA victims' families refused the offer and instead filed a claim for $2.2 billion against Libya. From 2004 to 2006 the U.S. and UK opened up relations with Libya, including removing sanctions and removing the country as a sponsor of terrorism.

In June 2004, a volunteer group of families and victims from the incident, Families from Pan Am Flight 73, was formed to work toward a memorial for those killed in the incident, to seek the truth behind this terrorist attack, and to hold those responsible for it accountable. On April 5, 2006, the law firm of Crowell & Moring LLP, representing the surviving passengers, estates and family members of the hijacking victims, announced it was filing a civil suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking $10 billion in compensatory damages, plus unspecified punitive damages, from Libya, Muammar al-Gaddafi and the five convicted hijackers. The lawsuit alleged Libya provided the Abu Nidal Organization with material support and also ordered the attack as part of a Libyan-sponsored terrorist campaign against American, European and Israeli interests.^[12]

British media that was critical of normalisation of relations between Gaddafi and the West reported in March 2004 (days after Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Tripoli) that Libya was behind the hijacking.^[13]

As of September 2015 about $700million of funds that Libya gave the USA to settle claims related to Libyan sponsored terrorism has not been distributed to families of victims who were Indian passport holders.^[14]

Reward and reported killing of accused[edit]

As mentioned, hijacker Zayd Hassan Abd al-Latif Safarini was extradited to the US by Government of Pakistan.10 He is serving his 160-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.

On December 3, 2009, the FBI, in coordination with the State Department, announced a $5M reward for information that leads to the capture of each of the four remaining hijackers of Pan Am 73, who were reported to have been escaped from prison in Pakistan in 2008.^[8]^[15]

One of the four, Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, was reported killed in a drone strike on January 9, 2010, in Pakistan. His death was never confirmed and he remains on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists and Rewards for Justice lists.^[16]^[17]^[18]

During his November 9, 2015 parole hearing at the federal prison in Terre Haute, IN, Zaid Safarini claimed to have been in touch with Jamal Rahim and the other hijackers recently - thereby confirming that the above news report of Rahim's death was false.

Aircraft[edit]

The aircraft was a four-engined Boeing 747-121 delivered to Pan Am on 18 June 1971, with registration N656PA^[19] and named Clipper Live Yankee by the airline. It was later renamed and at the time of the incident was named Clipper Empress of the Seas.