The United Arab Emirates’ chief prosecutor’s office said on Thursday that it had ordered an investigation into the apparent attempt to hijack and possibly crash a Flydubai flight to Israel a day earlier, DW reports.
The state news agency WAM said that “the investigation team has launched its work into the incident already” and that the probe would seek to determine “the degree to which [the incident] was linked to any terrorist activity or intent.”
The case will also seek to establish whether it was a premeditated and planned incident involving other actors or the work of a lone perpetrator.
Meanwhile, the Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry announced that the Flydubai co-pilot suspected of planning an attack on a flight bound for Israel had been transferred to the United Arab Emirates.
The plane’s captain and the co-pilot “after their health improved and the medical team cleared them, left the Kingdom heading to Abu Dhabi on Thursday morning… accompanied by the Emirati security team,” the ministry said in a statement,
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had called the emergency on the flight to Tel Aviv “an attempted jihadist terror attack” that was thwarted.
Passengers described rushing the cockpit to assist the pilot after he was stabbed by his copilot, who then put the plane into a steep dive in an apparent attempt to crash the airliner.
Aside from minor cuts and bruises among those who intervened in the cockpit, the passengers — the vast majority of whom were Israeli — were all unhurt.
