It was a look of evil he’ll never forget.
Gagandeep “Calvin” Kakar, a Long Island clothing company owner, said he stared into the face of crotch bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab just moments after the potentially deadly explosive he’d hidden in his underwear burst into flames.
“He wasn’t stunned or anything, even though all this was happening,” Kakar said.
“He had a defiant expression on his face — you could tell that he had a purpose.”
Kakar, 35, who was returning to his Albertson home on Christmas Day after a visit to India with his pregnant wife, described a scene of confusion and chaos in the frightening final moments aboard the Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
About seven hours into the trip, Kakar, seated four rows ahead of Abdulmutallab, said he heard a pop “like a champagne cork.” The plane was full of kids, so he brushed it off as the sound of a child’s toy.
But seconds later, a flight attendant screamed: “Fire! Fire!” and pointed at the bomber, Kakar said. “I turned around and saw a flame and smoke. As soon as she said that, there was panic.”
Amid the confusion, a heroic Dutch passenger, Jasper Schuringa, leaped over a row of travelers, put the bomber in a headlock and dragged him to the front of the plane, where he was handcuffed.
“People were still very scared,” said Kakar’s four-months-pregnant wife, Shelly, a dentist. “I was still worried that maybe he had put a bomb on the plane or had a Plan B. Maybe he had someone with him.”
Since Abdulmutallab’s clothes were smoking, fliers stripped him from the waist down.
“There were so many children crying,” Shelly, 32, said. “You could see people putting their hands together and praying.”
When cops took the al Qaeda-linked operative into custody, relieved passengers erupted in a round of applause, she recalled.
“I really feel like it was a Christmas miracle,” Calvin said.