EgyptAir hijacking: For once, it wasn’t terrorism

Dubai: It began as a routine internal EgyptAir flight between Alexandria and Cairo on Tuesday morning. 

Under normal conditions, the flight takes 40 minutes, but this Flight 181 was anything but routine.

On board, among the 55 passengers and eight crew was Saif Al Deen Mustafa, a 59-year-old Egyptian well known to police.

After Tuesday’s antics, Mustafa can add hijacking to his long criminal record.

Once in the air, Mustafa told the crew to divert to Larnaca, Cyprus. 

He was wearing a fake explosives belt.

Shortly after landing, he began to release passengers – even posing for a selfie with at least one of the travellers. He kept four crew members and three passengers on board while he made a series of demands, mostly over talking to his ex-wife who lived on the island  and wanted nothing to do with him.

Just minutes before the arrest, local TV footage from the airport showed several people disembarking the aircraft and a man who appeared to be a crew member climbing out of the cockpit window and sliding down the side of the plane.

“Our passengers are all well and the crew is all well... We cannot say this was a terrorist act... he was not a professional,” an Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman said. “He wasn’t a terrorist. He’s an idiot”

A Cyprus government official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said the man “seems [to be] in love. Always, there is a woman”. 

The pilot, Omar Al Jamal said that he was threatened by a passenger who claimed to be wearing a suicide explosive belt and forced him to divert the plane to Larnaca.

“I am not in a state to speak,”  he said, adding that he had been obliged to treat the suicide belt as real.