Co-pilot’s attempted hijack of FlyDubai flight revealed
JERUSALEM — The axe-wielding co-pilot who attacked the captain of a FlyDubai flight to Tel Aviv last month intended to seize control of the airplane and fly it into the passenger terminal at Israel’s main international airport, authorities in the United Arab Emirates said Friday, reports BritPanorama.
The suspect, an Omani national, acted “with the intention of causing the greatest possible number of human casualties,” the UAE’s top prosecutor stated in a communiqué disseminated by the state news agency WAM. Most of the 174 passengers on the flight were from Israel.
The prosecutor’s statement indicated that the co-pilot “drew inspiration” from the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States and employed two previous flights from Dubai to Tel Aviv to familiarize himself with the flight route and the airport.
None of FlyDubai’s security or professional checks had indicated that the pilot, identified by The Associated Press as 29-year-old Hamam al-Hammami, harbored extremist views or had plans to execute an attack.
Hammami “admitted that he had acted alone, without the involvement of others,” the statement noted, adding that he “provided a detailed confession outlining his motives and the stages of planning and execution” in the presence of his lawyer. It suggested he was radicalized at a mosque in Australia while attending the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2017.
The update from the public prosecutor on Friday was the most comprehensive since the UAE took control of the investigation shortly after the incident on September 30. FlyDubai is a government-owned airline.
The crisis unfolded unexpectedly in the skies above Jordan and Saudi Arabia when Hammami attacked the captain, Smit Machchhar, with a crash axe in the cockpit. Bloodied and beaten, Machchhar managed to open the cockpit door, alerting passengers and crew to the assault.
Passengers detained Hammami and helped stabilize the aircraft, which had plunged approximately 14,000 to 16,000 feet in under a minute. Two reserve pilots then guided the plane to an emergency landing at Tabuk airport in Saudi Arabia.
