Zia, with his party, arrived at around 3.30 p.m., and knelt towards Mecca before saying his farewells. He had persuaded both the senior US officials to join him for the return flight. They did so with no apparent concern. General Beg made excuses when the President tried to prevail upon him to board PAK 1. He would use his own plane as he had business to attend to at Lahore. It was a known practice of Zia’s to fly with the maximum number of top generals or officials to minimize the risks of a sabotage plot. Shortly before departure two crates of mangoes arrived for the VIPs, which were loaded in the rear without any check, together with a case of model tanks.
Strapped into the sofa and easy chairs inside the VIP capsule were Zia, Akhtar, Afzaal (Chief of the General Staff), Raphel, Wassom, and the President’s military secretary, Brigadier General Najib Ahmed. Zia, Raphel and Akhtar sat close together so they could chat during the flight, although conversation is difficult as the C-130 is an excessively noisy aircraft. At 3.46 p.m. PAK 1 lifted off after the Cessna security plane reported nothing untoward. On the flight deck the take off routine had been uneventful, with clear communications to the control tower. The fact that the aircraft lacked either a black box flight recorder or a cockpit voice recorder would later be the subject of censure, but at lift off none of the crew or passengers had the slightest hint of the catastrophe that was little more than two minutes away. Mash’hood gave his arrival time at Islamabad over the radio as the plane pulled up onto the sky and began to turn on to its correct course.
On the ground General Beg’s pilot was preparing to take off; at Sargodha PAK 2 was airborne, as was the Cessna. All were on the same radio frequency as PAK 1, so all heard the ground controller request PAK 1’s estimated position, and the response, “Stand by”. Then nothing, no mayday call, total silence, despite the increasingly frantic calls from the control tower as it was realized that something was radically wrong.
To the passengers the horror of the sickening plunge, with bodies hanging by their safety belts, unable to move, screams drowned by the uninterrupted roar of the engines, was indescribable. Then, the sudden, few fleeting moments of relief as the plane seemingly came under control and started to climb again, with the occupants lolling in the opposite direction or jammed hard back into their seats. But, finally, yet another terrifying dive as PAK 1 gave up the struggle to survive.
In Judicial terms it was either misadventure or murder. When the news broke, the chances of finding any Pakistani who believed it was an accident were a million to one against. Zia was a man with umpteen enemies. There has been at least six previous attempts at assassination, including a near miss by a missile fired at his plane. Probably his most uncompromising opponents within Pakistan were the Bhutto family. Zia had, despite the international outcry to commute it, confirmed the death sentence on the present Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s father—this, to the man who, as prime minister, had personally picked Zia, then the most junior lieutenant-general, for promotion of Chief of Army Staff over the heads of his seniors. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had made a decision that, three years later, he would pay for with his head. On 4 April, 1979, he was hanged in Rawalpindi jail. Thereafter the family feud was unrelenting. Zia imprisoned Benazir Bhutto and her mother, banned Bhutto’s political party, and had his sons Shah Nawaz and Mir Murtaza convicted of serious crimes in absentia. In exile Mir Murtaza established an anti-Zia terrorist group named Al-Zulfikar (The Sword) in Kabul, where it shared offices with the PLO. From there, and Damascus, it carried out a campaign of killing and sabotage which, in 1981, included the hijacking of a Pakistan International Airlines passenger jet. Then, in 1985, Shah Nawaz died a painful death in sinister circumstances in Paris, it being rumoured that he had been poisoned by Zia’s agents. There was, and still is, an implacable hatred between these two families. Benazir Bhutto claimed the crash was ‘An act of God’, before going on to win the general election three months later, to become Pakistan’s first woman prime minister.
Zia was a military man who, along with Akhtar, was the last officer to have been commissioned from the Indian Military Academies just before the partition of India in 1947. Once in politics he would often boast that “The Armed Forces are my constituency” and he never vacated the post of Chief of Army Staff that Bhutto had given him. But even within the military he had few friends. He quickly developed an uncanny knack of spotting potential rivals for power. These were removed from the scene by sacking, or posting to positions well away from the political centre at Islamabad. His only role as Chief of Army Staff had been to vet the promotions and postings of all officers to the rank of major-general or above. Numerous disgruntled Service chiefs were secretly delighted that Zia was dead.
Potential assassins were not restricted to Pakistanis. Ever since Zia had backed the Mujahideen in their struggle against the Soviets and their Afghan allies, Pakistan had been swamped with KHAD agents bent on undermining his government by a terror campaign of bombing civilians. KHAD is the Afghan secret police organization, trained and advised by the KGB. At the top of its hit list was President Zia, closely followed by General Akhtar. The Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan solely because Zia and given sanctuary to the Mujahideen and had, for nine years, been arming, training and advising them in a bloody guerrilla war that had cost the Soviet military 13,000 lives. The USSR blamed Pakistan for continuing to encourage and supply the Mujahideen in their attacks during the withdrawal, which was half-completed at the time of the crash. It had gone so far as to warn Pakistan, through the US Ambassador in Moscow, that it intended to teach Zia a lesson.
Then there was India. Pakistanis and Indians had slaughtered each other on three separate occasions, in 1947, 1965 and 1971. India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandhi was convinced that Zia was supplying weapons to Sikh terrorists. They had murdered his mother, and now several thousand armed Sikh insurgents were active in India. Zia was accused of meeting their leaders, and giving shelter and training to the guerrillas inside Pakistan. To counter this, Delhi had established a special branch of its Intelligence Service, with the unpretentious title of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), specifically targeted on Pakistan.
Even the US government shed few genuine tears at Zia’s death. It was the State Department’s belief that Zia had outlived his use fullness. With the Soviets leaving Afghanistan, the last thing the US wanted was for communist rule in Kabul to be replaced by an Islamic fundamentalist one. American officials were convinced that this was Zia’s aim. According to them his dream was an Islamic power block stretching from Iran through Afghanistan to Pakistan with, eventually, the Uzbek, Turkoman and Tajik provinces of the USSR included. To the State Department such a huge area shaded green on the map would be worse than Afghanistan painted red.
On the very day of the disaster the Pakistan Chief of Air Staff ordered a Board of Inquiry set up to inquire into the circumstances of the crash, assess damage and costs, apportion blame (if any) and make recommendations to avoid similar occurrences in the future. Air Commodore Abbas Mirza presided, with three other senior Pakistan Air Force (PAF) officers sitting as members. To provide technical advice and expertise six USAF officers were hurriedly flown from Europe to join the inquiry. They were led by Colonel Daniel Sowada.