Masood Azhar’s brother attends the funeral of IC 814 hijacker Zahoor Mistry, who was killed in Pakistan
According to reports in Pakistan, one of the hijackers of the IC 814 flight, Zahoor Mistry, was killed.
Mistry is said to have been killed by two bike-riding assailants in Karachi’s Akhtar colony on March 1. Geo TV in Pakistan confirmed the killing, identifying him as a “businessman” from Karachi. Mistry had been living in Karachi under the alias “Zahid Akhund” and running a furniture company called Crescent Furniture.
According to Pakistani media reports, Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar’s brother Rauf Asghar, as well as other members of the terror group, attended Mistry’s funeral. The assailants were also seen loitering in the area before the murder, according to local media.
The Indian Airlines flight was hijacked on December 24, 1999, shortly after taking off from Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport en route to Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. Rauf Asghar and Azhar’s elder brother Ibrahim Azhar were among the five hijackers, as was Mistry. Mistry was the one who killed Rupin Katyal, a 25-year-old passenger on the flight. Katyal and his wife were returning to Delhi after a honeymoon in Kathmandu.
The flight had been hijacked while flying over Lucknow and taken to Amritsar for refuelling, with 180 passengers including the crew. It attempted to land in Lahore after taking off from Lucknow but was denied permission by Pakistan. It was then transported to Kandahar, where the then-Afghanistan Taliban government joined the negotiations for the passengers’ release.
The negotiations came to an end on December 31, 1999, when Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar were released from an Indian prison. The trio was then linked to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen terror group.The three crossed into Pakistan after being released and handed over to Taliban authorities. Since then, Azhar has masterminded a number of terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir and across India, including the 2016 Pathankot airbase attack and the 2019 Pulwama attack, which killed 40 CRPF soldiers.
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