Kabir Khan's highly anticipated '83 finally hits cinemas this Christmas weekend. And as soon as this Ranveer Singh starrer sports drama about India's first Cricket World Cup victory in 1983 releases, the filmmaker will head to his next project. Peepingmoon.com has exclusively learned that Kabir Khan is next directing a big-scale web series based on the Kandahar hijacking by a Pakistani terrorist group in 1999. The show has tentatively been titled IC 814 and will premiere on the streaming giant Netflix.
"The Kandahar hijacking crisis brought India on its knees. It's a blot on Indian history that exposed the country's vulnerable underbelly and questioned the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government that failed to handle the crisis. Kabir Khan's show is based on the IC-814 flight pilot Captain Devi Sharan's book, Flight Into Fear: The Captain's Story, and chronicles the detailed account of this hostage crisis that kept India awake for seven fateful nights. How the terrorists breached the security checks, hijacked the plane, and forced the Indian government to fulfill their demands, what negotiations happened with hijackers and how the Crisis management group in Delhi comprising top names goofed up a rescue operation— this Netflix series explores everything related to the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 that forced India to release three Islamist terrorists to secure its 176 passengers and crew of the flight," a source close to the development told us.
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Envisioned as a massively-mounted thriller, the series will go on floors in mid-2022. Kabir Khan will jointly helm it along with Hindi Medium director Saket Chaudhary who's been associated with this project since its inception. Jamtara: Sabka Number Aayega fame Trishant Srivastava is writing the show while Andhadhun producer Sanjay Routray is backing it under his Matchbox Pictures banner. Kabir, Saket and Trishant are said to have gone through an extensive research for this show and will begin its pre-production from January 2022 onwards.
Indian Airlines Flight 814 was hijacked on December 24, 1999, when it was en route from Kathmandu, Nepal to Delhi. The airbus was hijacked by five masked gunmen shortly after it entered the Indian airspace. The terrorists forced the flight to touch down at several locations such as Amritsar, Lahore, and Dubai before finally landing it in Kandahar, Afghanistan which was then ruled by the radical regime of the Taliban. The hijackers released 27 of 176 passengers in Dubai but fatally stabbed one and wounded several others. The crisis lasted for seven days and ended on December 31 after India agreed to release three dreaded gangsters— Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Masood Azhar, who later planned and executed terrorist actions such as, the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl and the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
