Hijack victims’ 24-year ordeal continues

The sisters slumped against the bulkhead of the Boeing 747, pretending they were dead.

As five terrorists sprayed the darkened cabin with gunfire and lobbed grenades, someone opened an over-wing exit two rows ahead. Gargi and Giatri Dave, 10- and 13-year-olds traveling home to California alone after visiting family in India, clambered over the seat backs to the open portal.

Gargi stopped, daunted by the two-story drop to the tarmac. Giatri pushed her through, then jumped herself, injuring both feet. Gargi had landed on her head, and as she slipped in and out of consciousness, her hobbled sister dragged her under the plane, clear of the fusillade fired by the gunmen angry that their hijacking had gone awry.

In the 24 years since the Libyan-backed terror attack on Pan Am Flight 73 in Karachi, Pakistan, Gargi has suffered headaches, flashbacks, memory loss and learning problems. Both sisters still bear the psychological scars of the 16-hour siege during which a fellow American was summarily executed before their eyes. Nineteen other passengers died and more than 120 were injured in the chaotic moments before the terrorists were captured.

The ordeal was life-altering and their treatment has been costly. In 2006, the Dave sisters were asked by the law firm of Crowell & Moring to join 176 other surviving passengers, mostly foreign citizens, in a lawsuit seeking compensation from the regime of Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi, who had been accused of instigating the attack. All pledged to share any monetary recovery and to pay the law firm up to a 35% cut.

In 2008, after years of behind-the-scenes negotiations independent of the Crowell & Moring lawsuit, the U.S. and Libyan governments restored diplomatic relations and agreed to settle all outstanding claims. For the three dozen or so U.S. victims of Pan Am Flight 73, Tripoli provided about $150 million.

Gargi, now a 34-year-old Bay Area lawyer, last year received $3 million. Giatri, a 37-year-old radiation oncologist, is due roughly the same once a U.S. Justice Department agency works through the list of claimants.

But the long-delayed amends by Libya have been cold comfort. The Daves and other American survivors have been compelled to relive the terror in pursuit of the Libyan money, and the law firm and the foreign passengers left out of the bilateral U.S.-Libyan settlement have laid claim to 90% of the Americans’ compensation. A tangle of lawsuits and steep attorney fees now threaten to eat up the fund as the fight over who is entitled to it drags on.

The dispute raises complex legal questions and novel issues of terrorism law. Are the American plaintiffs obliged to share their awards with the foreign victims? Are the Crowell & Moring lawyers still entitled to their agreed cut, which could amount to nearly $40 million? Did the foreign nationals have a right to seek redress in U.S. courts because they included a few Americans in their lawsuit?

“Crowell & Moring is trying to take money it had no role in securing for U.S. victims,” said Gargi, who has accused the law firm of luring the U.S. survivors into a contract that is neither legal nor enforceable. She and nine others who have joined her in suing the firm also accuse its lawyers of muzzling dissent with threats of further lawsuits for breach of contract and violating a confidentiality clause of the retainer agreement.

Attorney Gargi has taken leave from private practice to assist the veteran human rights lawyer representing the U.S. survivors in challenging the Crowell & Moring contract. Giatri divides her time between Pasadena and Fresno, leaving the legal quagmire for her younger sister.

“I just don’t want to be a victim again,” the older sister says with an odd alchemy of defiance and fatigue.

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As the Karachi siege wore on, shouting and gunfire frightened 2-year-old Nilay Shah into inconsolable wailing. His terrified mother, Nilima, tried to calm him, to no avail.

“A terrorist came up to my mom and shoved a gun into my stomach and told my mom, ‘If you don’t shut him up, I’ll blow his brains out,’ ” Nilay said, recounting what his mother, aunt and grandmother, who also survived the hijacking, had told him over the years.

A website manager for the New York Giants, Shah doesn’t remember the bloody melee that left his left hand permanently disfigured after being hit by a bullet. But the ordeal still encroaches on his life and work these two dozen years later. He loathes flying, yet must accompany the NFL team on its away games.

“I can’t sit on the aisle,” he said of a phobia he can only explain as a legacy of the hijacking. “There’s medication that the team doctor gives me to ease anxiety, but it’s still hard.”

With his left pinky and ring finger fused into a useless claw, Shah has trouble gripping a steering wheel or wielding a knife and fork. His injury prevented him from playing sports, leaving him only his job on professional football’s sidelines to indulge a love of competition.

Shah received his $3 million payout from the Libyan fund late last year. But he heeded Crowell’s instructions to deposit the money in an escrow account for redistribution to the larger group — or face a breach-of-contract suit and financial ruin, Shah said.

“We were never allowed to talk to anybody about it,” Shah says of the agreement he signed with Crowell before he knew about the U.S. government negotiations. “This law firm had nothing to do with this deal, and they are pitting us against each other.”

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Capt.Bill Kianka had just finished setting up the instruments and navigation system for the pre-dawn takeoff from Karachi for Frankfurt, West Germany. He was about to start the engines when his first officer, Conway Dodge, halted their preflight banter in mid-sentence.

“Gunfire erupted then and we saw bullets ricocheting over the tarmac,” Kianka recalled of the aborted startup Sept. 5, 1986. “There were four of them, dressed as security guards.... As they came up the steps, the last one turned around and raked the ramp with automatic weapons fire, scattering everyone away.”

A flight attendant surreptitiously closed and locked the cockpit door. Kianka started shutting down the aircraft.

“The first thing you’re supposed to do is deactivate the airplane, so it doesn’t go anywhere. You turn off all systems and try to get off the airplane, if at all possible. That’s what we were doing,” Kianka said.

Flight engineer John Ridgway popped open an escape hatch over the pilot’s seat, crawled out and slid down the fuselage to the tarmac. Dodge followed as Kianka disabled the last systems.

“I expected them to enter the cockpit at any time. The door was closed, but back then a slight kick would have opened it,” Kianka said of his last hurried moments in the cockpit. He then went out the same way as his crew, burning his back as he glissaded over the slope of titanium and fell to the ground.

The three made their way stealthily to the control tower, where they watched the harrowing siege unfold as the sun rose.

The four gunmen were soon joined by Zayd Safarini, kingpin of the terrorist group Abu Nidal, who slipped on board amid the panic and confusion. Safarini combed the 360 passengers in search of Americans, demanding to see passports. He stopped at the seat of Rajesh Kumar and ordered the 29-year-old from Huntington Beach to kneel in front of an open door. When airport authorities failed to deliver another flight crew, Safarini shot Kumar in the head and dumped his body onto the tarmac.

After 15 hours of standoff, the sole engine supplying power to the plane burned out, plunging the cabin into darkness. The gunmen, fearing commandos were about to storm the aircraft, fired into the passengers and threw grenades. Those who could, like the Daves, fled through the exits. When the shooting subsided — some say the hijackers ran out of bullets — Pakistani security forces boarded the plane, freed the remaining hostages and arrested the gunmen. Nineteen, including another American, had been killed in the final shooting spree.

“I’ve been over the scenario in my mind a thousand times, trying to figure if there was a different way that could have prevented all this,” said Kianka, now retired and living in New Jersey. Learning later that the hijackers had intended to explode the plane over Israel, killing all on board and more on the ground, the pilot has concluded that he took the right action.

“Still, I was the captain of that airplane and responsible for all the passengers on it,” Kianka said. “I have to live with this for the rest of my life.”

Kianka’s claim to the Justice Department’s Foreign Claims Settlement Commission hasn’t worked its way through the bureaucracy yet. When he gets his payout, he doesn’t intend to deposit it with the lawyers. On the advice of an attorney friend, he has broken with Crowell to join the Daves’ lawsuit, despite threats from the larger victims’ group of “a crushing award of substantial damages” for abandoning his original pledge to share any money from the Libyan government.

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Crowell partner Clifton Elgarten, defending the firm against the Daves’ suit, declined to respond to accusations that the firm strong-armed the Americans into handing over their payouts for the larger group, an account now holding about $54 million and available only to the lawyers to cover expenses. “We worked for all 178 victims of the attack,” is all that Elgarten would say of the disputes between the attorneys and their U.S. clients.

Lee Boyd, an international human rights lawyer who helped negotiate German compensation for Holocaust victims, alleges in the class-action suit filed for the Daves that Crowell misrepresented the prospects of getting compensation for the multinational group and failed to point out the potential conflict of interest that now divides the firm’s clients.

The issue of whether the 2006 retainer agreement with Crowell is valid is before both a private arbitration panel in Washington and a California state court in Los Angeles.

Barring a settlement, the cases are expected to drag on for years, keeping the troubling memories of the hijacking in the forefront of the victims’ lives, their compensation locked in escrow and the question of what the U.S. survivors owe the foreigners unanswered.

Unlike the others who have received money, Gargi Dave has put her payout in a personal bank account. Even though she knows it may take years, she says she won’t be spending it until the legal uncertainties are over.

carol.williams@latimes.com