NEW DELHI, Oct 10: A young Indian airline employee who received a hoax call that triggered a massive hijack false alert last week has died from natural causes, an official said on Wednesday.

The death on Tuesday of 24-year-old Shahnawaz Wani from suspected heart failure was the latest twist to the drama in which crack commandos stormed a plane belonging to the domestic airline Alliance Air only to find no hijackers aboard.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was awoken in the middle of the night to help deal with the crisis, has ordered a probe into how the false alarm could have escalated into a full-scale hijack alert.

Wani fielded the anonymous telephone call late last Wednesday which warned that the plane en route to Delhi from Mumbai carrying 52 people was about to be hijacked.

Police and other security agencies questioned Wani after the false alarm in which the pilots of the Boeing 737 locked themselves inside the cockpit believing the hijackers were in the cabin while the crew thought they were in the cockpit.

Wani’s death sparked newspaper speculation about whether it might have been caused by the security questioning.

But a senior official of Alliance Air, a subsidiary of national carrier Indian Airlines, said: “It was a natural death...it is believed to be heart failure.

“There’s no reason to believe that he was being harassed (by security officials),” the official said.

After receiving the hoax call, Wani alerted his superiors, setting in motion a chain of events that led to ministers being roused from their beds at midnight to rush to a crisis control room.

The supposed hijacking was broadcast live on nationwide television and one minister said there were two hijackers “who didn’t speak proper English”.

Newspapers afterwards had a field day with the event with one branding it “Hijackass”.

Authorities in India have been on edge, fearing retaliation since India threw its support behind the US.

But newspapers said the jumpiness was excessive. —Reuters