US hostage on IC-814 helped hijackers spell `coffin’

NEW DELHI, JAN 3: When the armed hijackers of the Indian Airlines plane IC-814 asked the lone American among the hostages on board to spel...

NEW DELHI, JAN 3: When the armed hijackers of the Indian Airlines plane IC-814 asked the lone American among the hostages on board to spell coffin she expected the worst.

"When the bad guys approached me and asked what do you call the box to keep a body, I thought it was meant for me," said Jeanne Moore of Bakersfield, California, who is grappling to shake off the trauma of the eight-day ordeal before leaving for home on Monday.

"I spelt the word coffin and wrote it on a piece of

paper and gave it to them," Moore, a teacher and a psychotherapist said, "not knowing what was going to happen".

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The five hijackers had demanded that the body of Sajjad Afghani, chief of terrorist outfit Harkat-ul-Ansar in Jammu and Kashmir, be exhumed and the coffin handed over to them.

The abduction of foreign tourists, including two Americans in Kashmir in 1995 by Kashmiri militants, back in her mind, Moore often came to terms with the possibility of dying during the standoff.

"I always felt the pressure of being anAmerican … and was always expecting the worse to happen to me and I comforted myself by thinking about my family and my friends," she said.

"They took my passport and my offer to speak with my government was turned down making me more worried," she recalled.

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Moore, who was freed along with other hostages on the New Year’s eve, was relieved only after her son, Jim, a Bakersfield police officer, flew down here upon news of her release. Moore described how the hijackers played on the nerves of their captives, as she said "every day it was a new adventure. Several times I thought of dealing with the hijackers… but I knew it was not a good plan. I knew the ramifications".

"The hijackers kept saying we love you, we don’t want to hurt you… but we knew that wasn’t true," she says since they stabbed one man and slit his throat when he refused to keep himself blindfolded. "Though they were nice to women and children, I got hit on my head by one of the hijackers when I tried to bend and blow off a bug whichwas troubling me on my hand," the American who spent Christmas Day in the plane said. "It is truly amazing that anyone can be so cruel". The hijackers cracked jokes in local lingo but I was least interested and like most other passengers I tried to catch some sleep, she said.

"At one point of time they used to terrorise us and then you see them handing over packets of food. We were confused," Moore "The scene in there was not just like out of a Hollywood thriller which is dramatic and exciting…it was terror and bad stuff. They (hijackers) smelt bad too, she said.