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{Note: The below news piece clearly shows that this "hijack" was a drama staged by the Indian government and intelligence agencies and that these very forces now have murdered a person to cover their tracks. How can one explain a healthy 24-year-old dying of "heart failure"?}
The Telegraph (India), Wed Oct 10, 2001
SUDDEN DEATH OF WITNESS IN
HIJACK DRAMA
FROM AMBEREEN ALI SHAH
New Delhi, Oct. 9:
A little after CD 7444 took off from Mumbai on the night of
Wednesday, October 3, a phone call came to Alliance Air’s
office in Delhi saying the plane would be hijacked. That call was
received by Shahnawaz Wani, the supervisor on duty.
Six days later, Wani — only 24 years of age — died
today of “heart attack”. Possibly the most crucial
witness in the probe now under way into the hijack drama that
unfolded itself over five hours that night, Wani had set the
security operation in motion by passing on the warning to his
superior. He was the only one who could have identified the voice
of the caller.
Police said Wani died a natural death at 3 am in his Vasant Kunj
residence in south-west Delhi where he lived with his parents.
His father, M.S. Wani, informed the deputy commissioner of police
of the area, Taj Hassan, and produced a copy of the death
certificate from the municipal corporation.
After obtaining a no-objection certificate from the police,
Wani’s body was taken to Srinagar, his hometown, for the
burial today.
Asked if the police suspected foul play, Hassan replied: “We
cannot say anything because we have to go by what the family
members say and they have not said anything to this effect.”
An Alliance Air official said they were informed at 5.30 am of
his death and told that the cause was a heart attack.
Dailynews, Thursday, 10/11/2001
http://dailynews.netscape.com/mynsnews/story.tmpl?table=n&cat=50900&id=200110101036000259072
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A young Indian airline employee who received a hoax call that triggered a massive hijack false alert last week has died from natural causes, an official said on Wednesday. The death on Tuesday of 24-year-old Shahnawaz Wani from suspected heart failure was the latest twist to the drama in which crack commandos stormed a plane belonging to the domestic airline Alliance Air only to find no hijackers aboard.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was awoken in the middle of the night to help deal with the crisis, has ordered a probe into how the false alarm could have escalated into a full-scale hijack alert. Wani fielded the anonymous telephone call late last Wednesday which warned that the plane en route to Delhi from Bombay carrying 52 people was about to be hijacked.
Police and other security agencies questioned Wani after the false alarm in which the pilots of the Boeing 737 locked themselves inside the cockpit believing the hijackers were in the cabin while the crew thought they were in the cockpit.
Wani's death sparked newspaper speculation about whether it might have been caused by the security questioning.
But a senior official of Alliance Air, a subsidiary of national carrier Indian Airlines, told Reuters: "It was a natural death...it is believed to be heart failure."
"There's no reason to believe that he was being harassed (by security officials)," the official, who did not wish to be named, said.