New Delhi. Amid calls for boycott of web series ‘IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack’ by a section on social media for allegedly hiding the real identities of terrorists involved in the 1999 plane hijacking incident, casting director Mukesh Chhabra on Sunday claimed that the criminals had used fake names for each other and proper research was done for the show.
This web series is directed by Anubhav Sinha and is based on the incident of hijacking of an Indian plane by five terrorists 40 minutes after taking off from Kathmandu on 24 December 1999. It is being aired on Netflix from 29 August.
Several users of the social media platform ‘X’ shared posts claiming that the makers have changed the names of the hijackers to ‘Shankar’ and ‘Bhola’ to hide the names of terrorists belonging to a particular community. They used the hashtags #BoycottNetflix, #BoycottBollywood and #IC814. In this regard, a user accused Sinha of deliberately distorting the facts and also called the web series “propaganda”.
At the same time, another person wrote, “Anubhav Sinha has changed the names of the IC 814 hijackers to Shankar and Bhola. This is how Bollywood allowed the terrorists to win.” Another person on social media said, “The names of the IC 814 terrorists were Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, but in the film they have been changed to Shankar and Bhola.” Chhabra, a prominent casting director in the industry, said that the terrorists used fake names to address each other.
He said, “I have been reading a lot of tweets about the names of the hijackers. We did proper research. They used to call each other by those names (nicknames or fake names). Whatever name you want to give them.” Five terrorists hijacked the IC 814 plane on 24 December 1999 during a flight from Kathmandu to Delhi. The names of the terrorists were Ibrahim Athar, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Zahoor Ibrahim, Shahid Akhtar and Saeed Shakir.