Al Qaeda planned for several terrorist attacks at the end of the millennium. One such plan “was to hijack an Air India flight from Katmandu, Nepal, on December 24, 1999. Though successful, it was not considered part of the millennium attacks by most American terrorism experts at the time. Only the government of India saw clearly that the hijacking bore the imprint of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the ISI [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence]. India’s foreign minister Jaswant Singh negotiated with the terrorists, who were Kashmiris with long ties to the ISI, and wrote later in his memoirs that ‘this was not a simple hijack. …[I]t was rehearsal of sorts for what was to follow in New York…a kind of forerunner of 9/11.’ ”
– Bruce Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda, Page 95