Hijack hoax lands business-class flyer in jail for life

An Indian court sentenced a business class passenger to life in jail after he was found guilty of placing a hijacking note in the washroom of a flight, the first such ruling under a new law. Birju Kishor Salla, 38, was also fined 50m rupees ($720,000), which will be distributed among pilots, crew and passengers, a special court of the National Investigation Agency said in a judgment Tuesday. The passenger, who was flying on a Jet Airways India flight to New Delhi from Mumbai in 2017, was found guilty of intentionally disrupting the operations of an aircraft on board. “Flight No. 9W 339 is covered by hijackers and aircraft should not be land and flown straight to POK,” Salla wrote in a note placed in a tissue paper box, according to court filings. POK refers to the part of the disputed state of Kashmir that’s administrated by Pakistan. Salla further vowed to start killing people if the aircraft’s landing gear was deployed, according to the documents. A platinum member of Jet Airways’s loyalty program and a jeweller by profession, Salla may have wanted to ground the airline to woo a stewardess, who he hoped would then approach him for job, the Times of India newspaper reported without saying where it got the information.<br/>