By Leanne Khov
Entertainment Editor
On Tuesday, Mar. 29, EgyptAir flight 181 was intended to head from Alexandria to Cairo, however, it was suddenly hijacked by a man described as “psychologically unstable.” The 59 year old hijacker threatened to blow up the plane and forced the plane to turn its direction to Cyprus instead, terrifying many of the passengers.
The aircraft, carrying 70 passengers, was oddly taking a long time to get to Cairo when Farrah El Dibany, one of the passengers, noticed the plane was headed out over the Mediterranean Sea and the crew members began taking the passports from every passenger.
“When you fly to Cairo, you don’t cross the sea,” she said. “Then one of the cabin crew told us, ‘We are hijacked. We’re being hijacked.’ There was a lot of panic and crying on the plane. They didn’t tell us anything more. They didn’t say what he wants or where we’re heading, nothing. We were just kidnapped,” said Dibany to CNN.
Dibany also told CNN that the crew member didn’t explain why they were taking the passengers’ passports at first and the captain never gave an official explanation.
The cabin crew later told passengers “in a very calm voice” that the plane had been hijacked, “some women started crying, and there was a bit of chaos.”
According to Dibany, she saw that the hijacker was behind the curtain in the cabin most of the time and was only talking to the crew.
Egyptian officials characterized the hijacking not as an act of terrorism but more like a family issue with the man’s former wife. The unstable hijacker, identified as Seif el-Din Mustafa, initially wanted to speak to his Cryptic ex-wife who the police later brought to the Larnaca airport after the plane landed at 9 a.m. in Cyprus.
At some point during the hijacked, Mustafa claimed to be armed with a belt of explosives initially unknown by the pilots and crew members that it was a fake. The belt turned out to be mobile phone cases. Mustafa used personal items to deceive others with an explosive belt, but the items he used were deemed safe by security through the Alexandria airport X-ray machine.
“I think if Egypt was able to increase their security in airports, these types of incidents might not occur,” said sophomore Jessica Souder.
Most of the passengers were able to leave the plane safely when the plane landed in Cyprus. However, Mustafa held four members from the flight crew and three passengers that were foreigners.
Mustafa later spoke to the European Union with a set of demands, one being the release of female inmates held in Egyptian prisons. He also requested that the plane should be refueled so that he could travel to Istanbul. His confusing demands made it clear to officials that he was just an unstable person.
“He kept on changing his mind and asking for different things,” Homer Mavrommatis, director of the Cyprus Ministry of Foreign Affair Crisis Management Center, said to CNN
The incident was able to end peacefully when Mustafa later gave up on his demands and surrendered. He was immediately arrested by anti-terrorism police and is now being questioned by Cypriot authorities who are planning to impose charges on him.
