Neerja killer gets 160-year jail sentence

Seventeen years after Chandigarh8217;s Neerja Bhanot laid down her life as an air-hostess to save hundreds of others on the ill-fated Pan A...

Seventeen years after Chandigarh8217;s Neerja Bhanot laid down her life as an air-hostess to save hundreds of others on the ill-fated Pan Am flight, an American court today sentenced her assailant Zaid Hasan Abd Latif Safarini 42 to 160 years of rigorous imprisonment.

More than 50 victims and family members from around the world attended the sentencing, many providing powerful, emotional testimony about the devastation caused by the attack. Neerja8217;s brother was among them.

The Bhanot family living in Sector 46 here received information that Safarini pleaded guilty to all 95 counts against him and agreed to be sent to 160 years behind bars after the US government agreed not to litigate further.

Twenty-one persons were killed during the hijacking.8216;8216;The severity of the sentence imposed on Safarini underscores the brutality of his terrorist acts against innocent civilian lives,8217;8217; said Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Neerja was the senior purser aboard the Pan Am aircraft carrying 382 passengers and 16 crew members from Mumbai to New York via Karachi. The plane had touched down at Karachi when terrorists rushed in.

Neerja8217;s body had came home on her 24th birthday, ridden with bullets. Harish Bhanot, her father, says Neerja was the one to have shouted 8216;hijack8217; which alerted the flight crew who immediately escaped, thus immobilising the aircraft.

For the next 17 hours, she displayed nerves of steel, comforting with a smile the passengers held hostage.

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As the power generator ran out of fuel and lights went off, on Safarini8217;s instruction, the hijackers herded the passengers and crew members into the central section of the aircraft, opened fire on them, and sprayed them with automatic weapons fire.

Most surviving passengers and crew escaped through two doors of the plane, one of which was the emergency exit Neerja had thrown open. Eye-witnesses say she could have been the first one to slide down, but she played the captain, and pushed down other passengers, becoming a human shield when the hijackers opened fire.