A survivor of the 1986 Pan Am Flight hijacking has discovered why terrorists who held him at gunpoint decided to spare his life.
It was 5 September 1986 and Mike Thexton, then 27, decided to board a plane from Karachi, Pakistan after spending the summer hiking with his girlfriend in the Himalayas.
He’d also primarily been in Pakistan due to honouring his late brother, Pete. He had died three years earlier on Broad Peak, the 12th-highest mountain on the planet.
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“I can still call to mind the feeling as I put my bag down on this very big seat,” he told Sky in a new documentary. “I took out a book and thought: ‘This is fantastic.’”
However, Thexton’s bliss didn’t last long as Palestinian terrorists disguised as security officers jumped the stationary aircraft and quickly took the passengers as hostages.
Thexton said that he remembers being taken as a hostage and that a gun was pointed towards him.
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“I was told to kneel in the doorway,” he said.
“By then, I was never in doubt they would shoot me. I thought: ‘Somebody is going to die today, and it’s going to be me.’”
Despite this, he still attempted to appeal to his captor: “‘Please, please don’t hurt me. My brother has died in the mountains, my parents have no one else’. He just waved his hand as if to say, I haven’t got time for that.”
During the stationary plane hijacking, 21 people died and more than 100 were injured; but Thexton was spared by the terrorists.
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Apparently after 10 hours of kidnapping, the four captors 'opened fire, everywhere, aimlessly'.
Thexton said: "I heard a hand grenade, a Kalashnikov behind me and gunfire from the front.
“Then it went quiet. I lifted my head to see the shape of a door [a passenger had opened it] against the night sky.
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“I jumped off the port wing. I was underweight and wearing my mountaineering boots. I escaped with a scratch on my elbow.”
However, it turns out it wasn’t just luck that saved Thexton from instant death.
In a recent conversation with the terrorist ringleader Zaid Hassan Abd Latif Safarini, the real reason that Thexton survived the 12-hour ordeal was finally revealed.
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Safarini, who is currently serving a 160-year sentence in the US, told Mike that he still remembers his face and what he said to him on board the Pan-am Boeing 747.
He said to Thexton in broken English: “You mentioned to me that your brother is killed. I say, ‘OK man, just sit aside’. It touched my heart, actually.”
Following the surreal phone call, Thexton admitted that Safarini’s reasoning for keeping him alive wasn't what he was expecting.
He said: “I was astonished. The call ended and I just stared at the phone. In all the years, having had half a dozen theories about why they didn’t kill me, I never imagined that.
“Peter died, but I didn’t, because of him."
Following the plane hacking, Safarini and the other terrorist were sentenced to death in Pakistan.
However, Safarini was eventually released from prison, only to be re-captured by the FBI in 2001 and taken into custody in the US.
In 2003, he pleaded guilty to 95 counts which included murder.
For more on Thexton’s survival and recounts from other passengers, you can watch the new Sky documentary Hijacked on 29 April 2023.
Topics: Crime
Ella Scott