Man sentenced to life in prison for fake hijacking

A Mumbai based businessman has found himself sentenced to life in prison after he instigated a fake plane hijacking to try woo his ex-girlfriend.

Travelmole has reported that two years ago, Birju Salla left a hand-written bomb threat on a Jet Airways flight that his ex-girlfriend was working on. The note claimed there was a group of hijackers, as well as explosives on board.

The flight landed safely, without incident in Ahmedabad but hapless Salla was detained for his actions. He later confessed to investigators saying, the note was all a ruse that he hoped would force Jet Airways to close its Delhi operation so that his girlfriend, who worked in the airline’s Delhi office, would come back to Mumbai to be with him.

Salla was this month sentenced to life in prison for the actions, as well as ordered to pay a large fine, with his lawyers saying India’s tough anti-hijacking laws don’t leave much space for nuance when it comes to these sorts of crimes.

“But you must understand that there are only two kinds of punishment under the new anti-hijacking law — life imprisonment until death or a death sentence. If a hostage is killed, the punishment is death. In lesser circumstances the sentence is life. So the judge had only these two options,” his lawyer Rohit Verma told the Times of India.

The ultimate irony of the case is that Salla needn’t have faked the hijacking at all as the airline shut down in April 2019.

“Since no emergency funding from the lenders or any other source is forthcoming, the airline will not be able to pay for fuel or other critical services to keep the operations going,” the airline said in a statement. “Consequently, with immediate effect, Jet Airways is compelled to cancel all its international and domestic flights.”

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