Brit in Pan Am plane attack faces terrorist to find out why he spared his life
A British man who survived the 1986 Pan Am 73 plane hostage has faced the terrorist who held him at gunpoint to find out why he saved his life.
Mike Thexton was 27 when, after a summer hiking in the Himalayas, the plane he boarded from Karachi, Pakistan was hijacked by a Palestinian terror cell.
The plane never left the runway and for 12 hours, Mike and 400 others were herded by the four men, armed with rifles and hand grenades, to be killed.
The ringleader Zaid Hassan Abd Latif Safarini had planned to fly the plane into an Israeli military target, but the pilots escaped in the first few moments through a hatch in the cockpit.
The hijackers (pictured here) acted for Abu Nidal, then one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisations (FBI)"I was convinced I was going to die," now 63-year-old Mike tells Sky News in a new documentary.
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Mike's name was one of the first to be called, at the start of the hostage: "I was numb hearing my name." Twenty-one people died and over 100 were injured, but against the odds, Mike was spared and "escaped with a scratch on [his] elbow."
Mike had gone to the country in the wake of his brother, Peter's, death. He had died three years earlier, aged 30, on Broad Peak, the 12th-highest mountain in the world.
He says in the new Sky feature documentary, Hijacked: Flight 73 that he tried to appeal to his captor: "'Please, please don't hurt me. My brother has died in the mountains, my parents have no one else'. He just waved his hand as if to say, I haven't got time for that."
He feigned being a Muslim in an attempt to connect with the attackers, he prayed, touching his head to the floor.
After about 10 hours, "they opened fire, everywhere, aimlessly. I heard a hand grenade, a Kalashnikov behind me and gunfire from the front.
"Then it went quiet… I lifted my head to see the shape of a door [a passenger had opened it] against the night sky. I jumped off the port wing. I was underweight and wearing my mountaineering boots. I escaped with a scratch on my elbow."
Bloodstained shoes lie unclaimed at the area departure of Karachi airport on September 7, 1986 (AFP via Getty Images)
Freed Hostage Denis Wagstaff At London Airport (Chris Barham/ANL/REX/Shutterstock)Safarini is serving a 160-year sentence in the US and told Mike at the start of their phone call that it was nice to hear his voice and that he still remembers his face.
But Mike did not want platitudes, he wanted to know why he was not killed.
Safarini’s reply stunned him: ‘You mentioned to me that your brother is killed,’ he said in broken English. ‘I say, “OK man, just sit aside.” It touched my heart, actually.’
"I was astonished. The call ended and I just stared at the phone. In all the years, having had half a dozen theories about why they didn’t kill me, I never imagined that. Peter died, but I didn’t, because of him."
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Sunshine Vesuwala was a flight attendant who also survived. She was enlisted by Safarini to walk the aisles gathering passports.
Injured victims are evacuated to a US military hospital in Germany on September 6, 1986 (AFP via Getty Images)She tells Sky: "I had to try and not give him what he wanted. If they were white Americans, I dropped their passports [back] into their laps. I hid passports under the seat as he demanded [I] filter through them."
The brute made her drink beer with him and asked to open Champagne, saying it was his 24th birthday.
The gunmen and their accomplices were sentenced to death in Pakistan and later given life imprisonment.
Safarini had then been released from prison in Pakistan, but two weeks after 9/11 he was captured by the FBI and taken to the US. There, he later pleaded guilty to 95 counts, including murder.
Mike and Sunshine both attended his 2003 Washington court case.
"He was the man that was going to shoot me. He looked pathetic, broken", Mike says.
Hijacked airs on 29 April on Sky Documentaries and Now
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