Authorities arrested the hijacker of an Egyptian airliner that was diverted to Cyprus on Tuesday, after the plane’s passengers and crew were able to escape unharmed.
Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades announced that the hijacker, identified as Seif El Din Mustafa, had personal motives to hijack the jet and that it was not terrorism linked. Officials said Mustafa’s action was linked to his ex-wife, who is a Greek-Cypriot and lives in larnaca.
Witnesses told Cyprus Mail newspaper that he threw a letter out of the airport in larnaca, written in Arabic, asking that it be delivered to his former wife.
Asked if the hijacker was motivated by love, Anastasiades laughed and said, “Always there is a woman involved.”
“The hijacker has just
been arrested,” Cypriot Government spokesman Nicos Christodoulides said on Twitter. No further details were immediately available.
They laid him on the ground and searched him for around two minutes before taking him away.
Passengers and crew had earlier been seen leaving the aircraft, including one who climbed out of the cockpit window. The hijacker had been taken into custody.
The EgyptAir plane landed at the airport in the southern coastal city of larnaca at 8:50 am, after the hijacker had contacted the control tower 20 minutes earlier to demand the diversion.
Egyptian Civil Aviation said he had threatened to detonate an explosives belt on the Airbus A-320, which had been headed from the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria to Cairo.
Most of the passengers were allowed to disembark after the plane landed, but a handful of crew and passengers had remained on board until shortly before the hijacker’s arrest. Fathy had told a press conference that the captain, a co-pilot, an air hostess and a security guard, along with three passengers, had remained on board after other passengers and crew were released.
Fathy said there had been 55 passengers on board the plane and that the hijacker had demanded it land in either Turkey or Cyprus. The plane had been carrying 21 foreigners including eight Americans, four Dutch citizens, four Britons and a French citizen, an Egyptian civil aviation ministry statement said.
Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades had earlier told reporters the incident appeared to be motivated by personal reasons.
“The hijacking is not terrorism-related,” he told a joint news conference with the visiting president of the European Parliament, Martin Schultz.
Asked about reports that the hijacker had demanded to see a Cypriot woman, Anastasiades laughed and said: “Always there is a woman.”
The plane had been parked on the tarmac away from the new terminal building but just 200 metres from a beach where dozens of foreign tourists were out. The airport, the main entry point for tourists to the resort island, was closed and incoming flights diverted to Paphos on the country’s western edge.
Concerns were raised about security at Egyptian airports after a Russian airliner was downed on October 31 over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board. The Islamic State group claimed to have smuggled a bomb on board the plane.
larnaca is no stranger to hostage crises. Several hijacked planes were diverted to the airport in the last few decades.
In August 1996, a Sudan Airways Airbus A-310 was hijacked by seven Iraqis between Khartoum and Amman with 199 people on board. After a stopover in larnaca it flew on to london’s Stansted airport, where the hijackers gave themselves up.
In 1988, a Kuwait Airways flight hijacked en route from Bangkok to Kuwait was diverted to Iran’s second city Mashhad and later to larnaca, where hijackers killed two Kuwaiti passengers and dumped their bodies on the tarmac.
In February 1978, an Egyptian commando unit stormed a hijacked Cyprus Airways DC-8 at larnaca airport, where 15 passengers were being held hostage. Some 15 Egyptian soldiers were killed and 15 wounded in a firefight with Cypriot forces. All the hostages were freed and the hijackers arrested.