New details are surfacing about the Omani co-pilot accused of attacking the captain of FlyDubai flight 1073 and attempting to bring down the aircraft, which was carrying 174 people from the United Arab Emirates to Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a Thursday interview on Fox & Friends that the co-pilot underwent “Islamist radical indoctrination” before the attack. “The attacker, the copilot who attacked the captain, is now being interrogated, but here’s what we do know: First, we know that, he underwent Islamist radical indoctrination,” Netanyahu said, adding that investigators are drawing the conclusion “from the information – his personal information.”
A colleague who spoke to Israel’s Channel 16 journalist Yosef Yisrael, as reported by The New York Post, said the co-pilot was known among coworkers for extreme religious behavior, including refusing to shake hands with women. “For instance, he used to pray a lot, and would not shake hands with women,” Yisrael relayed. The co-pilot, an Omani national, had worked for the airline for less than a year.
The same colleague accused FlyDubai, a sister airline of Emirates, of putting the flight at risk by employing him. “There is no other way to put it, we hired the services of a terrorist and nearly caused the deaths of 180 people,” the coworker reportedly said, also noting that it is unusual for anyone other than Emirati nationals to fly routes into Israel and that it remains unclear how he ended up on this flight.
There is a serious question of how he boarded the flight at all. Travelers generally need a passport from a country with diplomatic relations with Israel to land there, and Oman does not meet that standard. That lapse is now under review.
Suspect moved to the UAE, Israeli investigators en route
David Mencer, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said Thursday that the Omani suspect has already been transferred to the United Arab Emirates and that Israel is sending its own investigators to join the UAE-led probe. “We’ll get to know a whole lot more information now that he’s in the UAE and we can join the investigation,” Mencer said. Israeli officials want to determine whether the co-pilot acted alone or was directed by someone else.
Mencer also described an account Netanyahu received from a passenger who had entered the cockpit during the attack. According to that account, the co-pilot stood over the aircraft’s controls and used his feet to try to destroy them while attacking the captain. “His objective was to bring down that airplane,” Mencer said.
Israel’s defense minister has called the incident “a jihadist terrorist attack.” This remains a developing story.
