An EgyptAir plane was hijacked on Tuesday while flying from the Egyptian Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria to the capital, Cairo, and later landed in Cyprus where the crew and a handful of passengers were still on board.
The Airbus flight number MS181 had 81 passengers on board and was flying on a regular route when the hijacking took place, the Egyptians said.
Shortly after, the Airbus 320 landed at the airport in the Cypriot coastal city of Larnaca, Cypriot officials said.
Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said the plane’s pilot, Omar al-Gammal, had informed authorities that he was threatened by a passenger wearing a suicide explosives belt and forced him to land in Larnaca.
Details were sketchy and the motives and identities of the hijacker or hjackers were also not known.
“The information we have so far is that it is one hijacker. The person has yet to make any demands,” Foreign Ministry Permanent Secretary Alexandros Zenon told French iTele television, adding that the hijacker had indicated he was willing to release a number of hostages.
All the officials in Egypt and Cyprus spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
EgyptAir later tweeted that all had been released from the plane except for the crew and four passengers, whose nationalities were not clear.
Passengers on the plane included eight Britons and 10 Americans, three security sources at Alexandria airport said.
Ian Petchenik, a spokesman for FlightRadar24, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that EgyptAir flight MS181 flew in a typical fashion on the Cyprus, without the pilots signalling any trouble via their transponder.
Petchenik said: “It looks like a completely controlled flight aside from the fact it was hijacked.”
The hijacking will most likely bring to the fore again the question of 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 extremist Islamic State group said it downed the plane.(Associated Press)
Link: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/egypt-air-hijacking-1.3510182
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