Cockpit Stabbing
A co-pilot stabs his captain and dives a Dubai-Israel flight before passengers force the plane down safely.
Flydubai Flight FZ981 dropped 17,000 feet in under two minutes. An Omani co-pilot stabbed his captain and dove the jet toward Israel. Passengers wrestled him from the controls before he could finish. Barely two minutes.
More than 170 people were flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv, BBC News reported. Passengers and a reserve crew member stabilized the aircraft before it landed at Tabuk airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia, according to the Guardian.
Captain Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, was stabbed. He's in stable condition, the Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia told the BBC. Saudi authorities arrested him. They're questioning him. DW reported that his identity, his motive, and any ties to a group or state remain unknown. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz called it an attempted jihadist terror attack.
Netanyahu had warned, days earlier, of an unspecified security threat ahead of Israel's October election, the Guardian reported. Israel's military said it had no specific intelligence of an imminent threat. Lapid, the opposition leader, said a security briefing the night before made no mention of any related threat, according to the Guardian.
Trump said he'd spoken at length with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At the White House, he told reporters the attacker was perhaps a terrorist, perhaps a whack job, the Guardian reported. Netanyahu told Fox News it was too early to say whether Iran was involved, though he said investigators would soon learn if the co-pilot had accomplices.
The UAE ordered its own investigation, state news agency WAM said, and will examine any link to terrorist activity. Netanyahu spoke by phone with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who agreed, the Guardian reported, to let Israel take part in the investigation. Flydubai suspended all flights to and from Israel.
Four passengers helped overpower the attacker. Israeli President Isaac Herzog plans to nominate them, including Yaniv Hayoun, for the Presidential Medal for Civil Courage, DW reported.
Hayoun rushed the cockpit the moment the plane dropped. "I grabbed the attacker, put him in a chokehold, and pulled him, first and foremost, outside," he told the BBC.