Police arrested a lovestruck “idiot” who wore a fake suicide belt and forced an EgyptAir passenger jet to land in Cyprus Tuesday moing, govement officials confirmed, ending a bizarre and frightening hijacking that stretched on for hours.
Officials in Cyprus said the hijacking was "over," with all the remaining passengers and crew freed. The country's president Nicos Anastasiades insisted it was not terrorism, with another govement official saying the man "seems (to be) in love."
Police said he demanded a meeting with his ex-wife, with whom he has four children. He reportedly gave negotiators the name of a woman who lives in Cyprus and asked to give her an envelope. Witnesses told state TV he tossed a letter for the woman onto the tarmac.
“Terrorists are crazy but they aren’t stupid. This guy is.”
- Egyptian foreign ministry
The hijacker also complained about the Egyptian govement and demanded the release of female prisoners from Egyptian jails, investigators said.
“He’s not a terrorist, he’s an idiot,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a statement to a Cairo-based joualist quoted by Reuters. “Terrorists are crazy but they aren’t stupid. This guy is.”
Egyptian officials have identified the hijacker as Seifedeen Mustafa. An earlier name they gave was wrong. One photo that spread online appeared to show the hijacker posing for a selfie with another man onboard.
A police official said the hijacker walked off the plane and was taken into custody by special anti-terrorism police. He said the man wore a belt but there were no explosives in it. Police in Cairo were questioning the hijacker's relatives, Sharif Faisal, the police chief for the industrial suburb of Helwan, told The Associated Press.
The hijacker forced the EgyptAir Airbus A320, which left from Alexandria, to land more than 300 miles away at Laaca airport on the southe coast of Cyprus. The flight was scheduled to land in Cairo. At least 55 passengers were on board.
Egyptian passenger Farah el-Dabani told the Dubai-based Al-Arabiyah TV network that the suspect was seated in the back of the aircraft and that it was the crew who told passengers that the plane was being hijacked. "There was panic at the begiing, but the crew told us to be quiet. They did a good job to keep us all quiet so the hijacker does not do anything rash," she said in a telephone interview.
He initially released most of the passengers, but kept three as well as four members of the cabin crew for several additional hours. Local television caught one of the last people to get off the plane, reportedly a crew member, escaping through a cockpit window and sliding down to the ground.
The director of the Alexandria airport, Hossni Hassan, said there were 26 foreigners on board, including eight Americans, four Britons, four Dutch, two Belgians, a French national, an Italian, two Greeks and one Syrian. He said three other foreigners could not be identified.
Sky News reported that the short-haul Flight 181 took off from Alexandria at 8 a.m. Cyprus time. The hijacker contacted the control tower in Lanarka 30 minutes later and was given permission to land.
The plane landed at the airport in Laaka at approximately 8:45 a.m. local time.
Ian Petchenik, a spokesman for flight-tracking website FlightRadar24, said the flight showed no signs of distress on its route to Cyprus. "It looks like a completely controlled flight aside from the fact it was hijacked," Petchenik said.
Reuters, citing an Israeli military source, reported that Israel scrambled warplanes in its airspace as a precaution in response to the hijacking.
The hijacking again calls attention to security at Egyptian airports, five months after a Russian aircraft crashed over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula minutes after it took off from Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. All 224 people on board were killed in the crash. Russia later said an explosive device brought down the aircraft and the Islamic State terror group claimed it downed the plane.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.