Nadya Hussain narrates to Marc W. Mooney the ordeal that she underwent at Karachi airport when terrorists hijacked her plane in 1986.  

 The crackle of gun shots and men shouting in Arabic broke the predawn calm. Passengers were just settling in for a long early morning flight.

When the hijackers stormed the cabin, I asked a passenger what was happening and was told the plane was being hijacked. This made me so angry. “How could anyone think they were superior, and play god?” holding all of us captive to try and accomplish their goal by violating us. I then asked myself.

“Why? Why is this happening to anyone, let alone me?”
The hijacking of Pan American Airline's Flight 73 remains, even after two decades, one of the most brazen and horrific in the history of aviation terrorism.

My account of that day is based mostly on my own recollection. But, in order to fill in key details, it also draws on testimony of fellow passengers quoted in news reports. Rereading those dispatches from long ago coincidentally dredged up long suppressed emotions and impressions.

We were scheduled to fly from Karachi to Bombay and then on to New York, Sept 5, 1986, when four Palestinian agents of the notorious Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO) took over the plane intending to hijack it to Cyprus.

They were wearing the uniforms of airport security men and had driven to the boarding ramp in what appeared to be a “security” van. Their insidious plot entailed arriving at the airplane posing as protectors of passengers, but then turning on us with a bloodthirsty vengeance.

I was returning home to the United States after spending a summer vacation with my grandparents in Pakistan. My grandmother was seated next to me.

In the moments the terrorists were seizing control of the passenger deck, the cabin crew tipped off the flight crew, allowing an escape through a hatch in the overhead of the cockpit. This made me angry since we were the responsibility of the pilot and co-pilot; however, “it effectively grounded the plane.”

The terrorists, frustrated by the fact that we weren't going anywhere, demanded that Pan Am get another flight crew. When Pan Am and airport authorities didn't oblige quickly, or even within several hours, and with nobody in charge of the aircraft but flight attendants, the terrorists threatened to kill one of the 357 passengers every five minutes of delay.

I was sixteen at the time. In many ways I was a typical American teenager, impatient, frivolous, and perhaps even a little reckless. I was certainly emotionally unprepared for what followed. Who wouldn't be?

The terrorists ordered us all to put our heads in our laps and raise our arms in the air holding our passports. Then they ordered flight attendants to collect passports.

I remember turning my passport over to the chief flight attendant, a pretty Indian national in her early twenties, who instantly recognised it as American. In her effort to protect me, she threw my passport behind my back on the seat in order to conceal my identity.

The terrorists eventually rounded up an American of Indian descent. They made him kneel down, head bowed. The ringleader shot him fatally in the head at point-blank range and dumped his body onto the tarmac.

I am far from a devout Muslim, but it was a prayer that carried me a long way through this ordeal. My grandfather took us to the airport that morning and was suddenly silent at our departure. It seemed that he had a bad feeling about the flight.

He insisted I memorise a prayer Muslims recite to allow safe passage
“By Allah I commence (my journey) and by Allah I seek to accomplish (the purpose of my journey) and by Muhammad I have set out (towards my destination). 'O' Allah make me overcome all (my grief); and make easy for me all difficulties; and give me more of goodness than I hope for, and keep away all evil of which I am apprehensive for my health. 'O' the most Merciful.”

I would say the prayer over and over. I prayed not only for my grandmother, but for the safety of all the passengers and crew.

I may have been young, and a little naive, but it was not lost on me even then that there was something weird about the fact that captor and captive, hostage-taker and hostage, were appealing to the same God “Allah Hu Akbar!”
At one point, one of the terrorists took off his shirt in order to intimidate us by showing us “who was in charge” since he was revealing the hand grenades strung like necklaces and forming an “X” over his hairy chest. The brazen machismo of such a display of deadly force was at once horrifying and comical to me.

“Who does this guy think he is,” I said to myself, “Rambo?”
I actually thought of tripping one of the terrorists strutting up and down the aisle. I was angry at their violent abuse of the flight crew. I shared my idea with my grandmother who wisely told me to forget about it, “you'll get shot.”
The terrorists never did make good on their threat to kill us one by one like clockwork.

On the contrary, there would be a rare moment of compassion. I complained to one of them that a toddler near me was driving me insane with his crying and they should feed him as he was most likely crying because of hunger. They actually listened and soon after they ordered the flight crew to pass out sandwiches.

As it turned out, I would get shot in the very last minutes of a standoff that took 16 hours to play out. It seemed as though time came to a standstill and as though we were in that plane forever!

It wasn't a lack of will or staying power on the part of the terrorists that brought the standoff to an end, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Eventually, after so many hours of sitting on the airport runway, the plane's power supply simply gave out, which robbed us of air-conditioning. It got warm quickly and I felt drowsy. I fell asleep in the clump of passengers the terrorists had created by herding us all into the aisles and seats of the plane's middle section.When the lights dimmed, the terrorists must have believed a Pakistani commando raid was underway or imminent. They panicked, started yelling at each other and then began lobbing grenades and firing automatic weapons into us.
Their intention was to massacre as many passengers and crewmembers as they could before getting captured or killed themselves.

Basically, it was a grenade exploding near me and bullets tearing into my flesh that woke me up! Bullets and hot grenade shards ripped into my face, arm and shoulder. I was in agonising pain, bleeding profusely, in shock and unable to move.

I could see my grandmother was okay, because she was trying to get me to the exit door, where other passengers who could escape were running to. But she was too weak to pick me up. It took everything in me to try and walk; since when one is shot in the arm one's arm is completely numb as well as it “weighs a ton.”

It was at this time that someone I can only call a Guardian Angel came to my rescue. He was Pakistani, a passenger I hadn't noticed before, who swept me into his arms and carried me out the door onto the wing of the Boeing jumbo jet.

It was chaos on the plane, everybody screaming and running, with some of the injured passengers desperately jumping from the wing to the tarmac in what seemed like the height of a two-storey building. I asked my grandmother if we should jump and she said “don't even think about it” which was wise since I was in bad shape.
This man, an utter stranger, with no connection to me except that we were fated to share this atrocity together, scooped me up, carried me over the bodies of fallen passengers and pools of blood. He slid down the emergency chute to help me into an awaiting ambulance.

I never saw him again. To this day, I still don't know who he is. And I don't know if I could recognise him if I did meet him. But I thank him always in my prayers.

It took many years for me to recover from the wounds, which were physical, mental and emotional.
I bear quite visible scars on my face, neck and shoulder.

Intensive physical therapy allowed me to gain back motion in my am and shoulder, so I am able to swim several hours a week.

There are still shrapnel and bullet fragments in my body. Surgeons considered it too risky to remove them. But some of the shrapnel caused a tumour to form in my clavicle. After doctors removed it I had to undergo radiation therapy.
I no longer wake up screaming in the middle of the night with nightmares. But news of fresh atrocities revives traumatic memories I cried relentlessly after planes hit the World Trade Centre.

That lovely, courageous chief flight attendant died in the hail of gunfire. She was one of twenty fatalities, which included two Americans; 150 more passengers were injured.

There was much second guessing about Pan American's flight crew bailing on the passengers in a time of peril. But would the terrorists really have spared the women and children if they were offered passage to Nicosia?
For the most part I have healed and moved beyond the nagging questions and mysteries to lead a relatively normal life. For this I give credit to the power of prayer and a close family. My mother, father and sisters would light the way for me through an often dark journey of recovery.

The terrorist ringleader, now in his late forties, is serving multiple life sentences with no chance of parole in the Colorado Supermax, the maximum federal security prison in the country.

Neither he nor the other hijackers who terrorised Flight 73 could end my life. But what they effectively destroyed was my innocence. I was a child trapped at the intersection of intense national and religious hatreds. I am an early battlecasualty of a long conflict that is now officially acknowledged as Terror War.

And I have been pained to learn that as bad as it was in Karachi 22 years ago, terrorists are capable of using airplanes to commit atrocities even more audacious, heinous and spectacular in their results.

In writing my story I am not trying to portray myself as a heroin; for I am not, I am just trying to convey the fact that life is not always easy but it is precious and one must not give up and continue to “live life to the fullest”. Also that one must not feel sorry for his/herself since most times there is someone who is worse than you are.