MIKE Thexton was 27, exhausted and ready to return home to Britain after a summer hiking in the Himalayas when he boarded a plane in Karachi, Pakistan. As fate would have it, the plane would never leave the runway.
At 5.44am on 5 September 1986, Pan Am flight 73, which was en route from Mumbai to New York via Frankfurt, was hijacked. For 12 of the next 15 hours, Mike, one of almost 400 people on board, was held at gunpoint by one of four hijackers, part of a Palestinian terror cell intent on selecting Americans, but willing to settle for a Brit.
The men, armed with rifles and hand grenades, had already killed their first passenger, 29-year-old Rajesh Kumar, who had been an American citizen for just two months,…
