WHY WASI SPARED?

Mike Thexton was convinced that he was going to die when he was taken hostage in 1986 during the infamous hijacking of Pan Am 73. Forty years on, in a remarkable phone conversation, the gunman explained why he decided not to shoot him

- DEBORAH LINTON

MIKE Thexton was 27, exhausted and ready to return home to Britain after a summer hiking in the Himalayas when he boarded a plane in Karachi, Pakistan. As fate would have it, the plane would never leave the runway.

At 5.44am on 5 September 1986, Pan Am flight 73, which was en route from Mumbai to New York via Frankfurt, was hijacked. For 12 of the next 15 hours, Mike, one of almost 400 people on board, was held at gunpoint by one of four hijackers, part of a Palestinian terror cell intent on selecting Americans, but willing to settle for a Brit.

The men, armed with rifles and hand grenades, had already killed their first passenger, 29-year-old Rajesh Kumar, who had been an American citizen for just two months, shooting him in the doorway of the 747 and kicking his body onto the Tarmac.

They called Mike forward after passengers’ passports had been gathered and sifted through for Westerners. He walked to the front of the aircraft.

“I was numb hearing my name. I was trying to convince myself that there was some innocent explanation and maybe they’d let me off the plane, but I kept coming back to that they were surely picking me out to shoot me,” Mike recalls.

Pan Am chiefs negotiated from outside. Fellow passengers were herded into the plane’s centre. As the hours stretched on, children played to distract themselves and grown-ups prayed.

Mike, an accountancy teacher, feigned Muslim prayer in a bid to win his captors’ grace. He also pleaded with the ringleader, Jordan-born Zaid Hassan Abd Latif Safarini, to spare him. Mike had been in the Himalayas in honour of his brother, Peter, who had died there three years earlier.