India Tomorrow
Ahmedabad, June 11—Birju Kishore Salla, a businessman, was found guilty of planting a hijack threat letter on a Mumbai-Delhi flight of Jet Airways in 2017, and awarded life imprisonment for the remainder of his life by a special NIA court in Ahmedabad. He was also slapped with a fine of Rs five crore.
On October 30, 2017, Salla had left a note onboard a Jet Airways flight bound for Delhi from Mumbai, warning that there were hijackers and explosives onboard. He did so in a “planned manner”, according to the chargesheet, filed on January 23 last year, and preparation of the threat note was captured on the CCTV camera, according to a report in The Indian Express.
In May 2018, Salla became the first person to be put on the national no-fly list. He was also the first person to be tried under the stringent Anti-Hijacking Act after it was amended in 2016.
The court has directed Salla that of the five crore rupees of fine, he had to pay one lakh rupees each to the pilot and co-pilot of the flight. The court has also ordered that Rs 50,000 be paid to two air hostesses and another Rs 25,000 to each of the other crew members on board. There were 115 passengers and seven crew members aboard the flight.
After the authorities had recovered his note, the flight made an emergency landing at the Ahmedabad airport on October 30, 2017.
According to investigators, Salla was having an affair with a Jet Airways employee. He planted the letter since he wanted the woman to quit her job, a Scroll.in report said.
On January 23, 2018, NIA had filed its chargesheet which had stated that the threat note, which he had put in the tissue paper box in the plane’s toilet, was typed by him on his laptop at his Mumbai office the same morning of his flight and had got a print of it from the office printer.
“Flight no 9W covered by Hijackers and aircraft should not be land and flown straight to POK. 12 people on board. if you put landing gear you will hear the noise of people dying. don’t take it as a joke…,” Salla wrote in English, according to the chargesheet.
The chargesheet also said that the same note also carried a rough Urdu translation of the same message and that the accused did with the help of Google Translator.
