An EgyptAir plane flying from Cairo to Beijing has been forced to make an emergency landing in Uzbekistan due to a bomb threat, Uzbekistan Airways says.
All 118 passengers and 17 crew on board the Airbus A330-220 were evacuated at Urgench International Airport, in the east of the country, a statement said.
The aircraft was being searched by local authorities, it added.
Last month, an EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board crashed into the Mediterranean Sea.
The cause of the crash remains a mystery, although French investigators said a week ago that signals from one of the plane’s black boxes had been detected.
There has so far been no comment from EgyptAir on Wednesday’s incident.
But unnamed Egyptian officials told the Associated Press news agency that an anonymous caller had telephoned security agents at Cairo’s airport to say a bomb was on board the flight to Beijing.
The agents immediately contacted the aircraft and told it to land at the nearest airport, they said.
It eventually touched down at Urgench, about 840km (600 miles) west of the Uzbek capital Tashkent, at about 23:30 local time (18:30 GMT) on Tuesday, three hours after it took off from Cairo, AP reported.
An Egyptian aviation source told Reuters news agency that no explosives had been found by Uzbek security forces and that the plane was “preparing to resume its journey”.(BBC News)
Link: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36477768
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