Mike Thexton, then 27, was returning from Karachi in Pakistan after spending the summer climbing the Himalayas when a Palestinian terror cell hijacked the plane. A British man who was aboard the Pan Am 73 plane when armed terrorists stormed it during a 1986 assault that killed 21 people confronted the man who held him at gunpoint.
The jet never gave up on the fugitive and for a terrifying 16 hours, Mike and 400 other people were held captive by the four men, who were armed with rifles and hand grenades. The head of the terror group, Zaid Hassan Abd Latif Safarini, had planned to fly the plane into an Israeli military target, which would likely have killed everyone on board, but the pilots escaped through a hatch before they could enter the cockpit.
Mike begged to be spared during the attack and always wondered why he had survived. He was shocked to find out why one of the terrorists chose to pardon him after more than three decades of questioning. After boarding the ill-fated flight, the Briton first realized something was wrong when he yelled on board. He then saw a man wrestling with a flight attendant as she held a gun to his head.
Mike Thexton Age
Mike Thexton is 27 years old.
Mike Thexton survived the 1986 Pam Am hijacking
Mike’s name was one of the first to be called by the terrorists, who were targeting Western tourists, and they held him at the front of the plane before massacring 21 people and injuring more than 100.
Terrorists first killed a passenger after failed attempts to negotiate for a pilot to return to the plane. But despite being ‘convinced’ that he was going to die, Mike, now 63, managed to survive the encounter with only a ‘scratch’ on his elbow.
After being held at the front lines for hours, he fell asleep, before one of the terrorists woke him up and ordered him to return to the rest of the group. Nearly 37 years after the nightmare in which 360 passengers were held, he has relived his ordeal in a Sky News documentary, which will air tonight.
Mike had visited the Himalayas to honor his brother, Peter, 30, who died three years earlier while climbing Broad Peak, the world’s 12th-highest mountain.
He says in the new Sky documentary, Hijacked: Flight 73, that he begged his captor not to kill him: ‘Please don’t hurt me. My brother has died in the mountains, my parents have no one else.’
Mike said, “he just waved his hand as if to say, I don’t have time for that.” Speaking to MailOnline, Mike revealed how the death of his brother had touched the heart of Safarini, who is currently serving a 160-year prison sentence in the US.
Mike spoke to the terrorist in a phone call last summer and demanded to know why his life had been spared all those years ago. Safarini’s response took his breath away: “You mentioned to me that your brother was killed,” he said in broken English. “I’m like, ‘Okay, man, just sit to the side.’ He touched my heart, actually.
“I was surprised when he told me that he put me back with the others at the end because of what he had said about my brother’s death,” he told MailOnline.
Read Also: Who is Kirsty Curtis? Wiki, Biography, Age, Family, King’s Guard horse bites
‘When I said that, 12 hours earlier, I didn’t think I was even listening. “And yet, she remembered it herself 12 hours later at the end of the kidnapping, and 36 years later when we spoke. ‘I had thought of a number of possible reasons why he gave me that opportunity, but this one had never crossed my mind.
And he said they opened fire because they panicked, which is the first time I’ve heard him admit it. Both answers were important to me. During his ordeal, Mike tried to connect with his attackers in another way: by pretending to be a Muslim and praying.
After 10 hours, the plane’s power unit shut down and it was left in the dark. All hell broke loose then, with the terrorists opening fire and killing the passengers. “The plane went dark after the power unit failed. Then – bang! I remember it started with a hand grenade explosion,’ he told MailOnline.
‘Then – automatic fire from a few rows ahead of me, impossibly strong. Then automatic shots from the rear of the plan, surprisingly distant and silent.
The men in the front changed their magazines and fired again, then again into the rear. And then, it can’t have been silent, but it had been so loud that I only remember silence. I saw the shape of a door, the night sky a different shade of black, and realized that it was time to leave.
Sunshine Vesuwala was a flight attendant who also survived the kidnapping. Now 58, a business owner in Ontario, Canada, and a mother of two, she had completed her training only a few months earlier.
Moments after the kidnapping began, a gun was held to her head and then to her back as terrorists wearing military uniforms attempted to storm the cabin.
Later Safarini ordered him to walk the halls collecting passports. She tells Sky: ‘I had to try not to give him what he wanted. If they were white Americans, I dropped their passports [back] into their laps. I hid the passports under the seat while he demanded that I leak them.
“It was a gamble and I could easily have turned around if I had been caught,” she added in an interview with MailOnline.
Recounting the moment when the terrorists started killing people, she continued: ‘The first thing I thought was that we were all going to die. Once the shooting stopped and I was still in one piece, I noticed that the door closest to me was open and people were running for the exit.
‘I watched and waited until I could head in the same direction and came out on the wing. “People were jumping off the wing and others who couldn’t were left behind. There were too many people to control and direct, so I let them jump if they wanted.
‘They were in a real panic and there was no stopping them. Some of the passengers saw me there and grabbed me asking for help. Sunshine was praised for her bravery, and she said her decision not to hand over Western tourists’ passports helped save lives.
She also remained on the plane to help injured passengers and colleagues escape to safety. Insisting that she is not a hero, she told MailOnline: “My uniform meant I was responsible for my passengers, I couldn’t just leave them and run.” They were defenseless, some badly injured, and badly traumatized. My conscience would not let me go.
The gunmen and their accomplices were sentenced to death in Pakistan and later to life imprisonment. Safarini had been released from prison in Pakistan, but two weeks after 9/11 he was captured by the FBI and taken to the United States, where he pleaded guilty to 95 charges, including murder.
Note: We strive to generate original and high-quality articles. Content posted on Wikibious.com may not be republished, copied, or redistributed, in whole or in part, without acknowledgment or permission. This article is for educational purposes only and the information mentioned here may not be 100% correct. We are collecting information from our sources, if you have any problem with the item, you can tell us. Follow us on Facebook.