Netanyahu praises attacked pilot: “a true hero”

Violence on a plane

Netanyahu praises attacked pilot: “a true hero”

The flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv apparently narrowly escaped disaster, and Israel is calling it a terrorist attack. Now more and more details are becoming known about what happened in the cockpit.

After the violence on a flight to Tel Aviv has Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu honored the fearlessness of the pilot who was allegedly attacked by his colleague. “He is a true hero,” Netanyahu said on Platform X in the evening. Despite serious stab wounds, the Indian captain resisted, opened the cockpit door and allowed passengers to overpower the attacker.

In doing so, Netanyahu wrote, he had prevented a catastrophe. “He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals.” He wished the man a speedy recovery. The Indian Embassy in Saudi Arabiawhere the plane made an emergency landing, announced in the evening that the pilot’s condition was stable.

The flight of the Emirati company Flydubai was on its way from on Wednesday Dubai to Tel Aviv when the altercation in the cockpit occurred. Israel’s government assumes an attempted jihadist terrorist attack – but important questions remain unanswered.

According to Netanyahu’s earlier statements, one of the two pilots stabbed his colleague as the plane moved in the morning Israel approached. He apparently intended to crash the plane with the passengers. According to consistent reports, the plane went into a nosedive. After the suspected attacker was overpowered, the plane was able to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia – a second crew traveling in the cabin took over the controls.

The passengers were taken to Tel Aviv in the evening on a replacement flight from Tabuk in Saudi Arabia and were greeted with cheers. Such a direct flight is a rarity between the two countries, which do not have diplomatic relations.

A woman who was on the plane with her four daughters told the Times of Israel newspaper that there were “two miracles”: that there were Israelis on board who heroically went into the cockpit – and that there were other pilots on board who were able to land the plane.

Netanyahu met on Airport from Tel Aviv a passenger who had broken into the cockpit. The US broadcaster CNN published a video of the meeting in which Yaniv Hayun, wearing blood-stained clothing, describes how he and others stopped the attacker. When he got into the cockpit, the attacker was working on the on-board instruments – Hayun suspected that the man wanted to make the aircraft unusable.

In an interview with the US broadcaster Fox News, Netanyahu later said of his compatriot: “That was tremendous courage that prevented another attack like the one on September 11th.” In the terrorist attacks in the USA Almost 3,000 people were killed in 2001 when terrorists from the Islamist network Al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger planes and piloted two of them into the towers of the World Trade Center. Another plane hit the Pentagon. A fourth plane crashed Pennsylvania away.