Authorities are investigating how the Egyptian man who hijacked an Egyptair Airbus A320 Tuesday managed to smuggle a fake suicide belt onto the airplane, raising further questions about airport security in Egypt in the aftermath of last year’s bombing of a Russian passenger jet on its way to St. Petersburg from Sharm El Sheikh. Fooling crewmembers into thinking he carried explosives, the hijacker, identified as Seif El Din Mustafa, ordered them to divert from the flight’s intended route from Alexandria to Cairo, and turn north toward the Mediterranean Sea. The A320 finally landed in Larnaca, Cyprus, where police convinced the hijacker to release most of the airplane’s 62 other passengers and crewmembers before he walked down the airstairs and into custody without further incident.
While the precise motivation behind Mustafa’s actions remain unclear, the Wall Street Journal reported that he demanded the release of 63 women imprisoned in Cairo and insisted that authorities pass a four-page letter he wrote to his Cypriot ex-wife.
The incident comes only six months after the apparent bombing of a Metrojet Airbus A321 over the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 passengers and crewmembers. In that case, a faction of the ISIS terrorist group claimed responsibility for the explosion that caused the airplane to disintegrate in midair. Less than three weeks later, Russian authorities concluded that, in fact, an explosive device did bring down the A321.
Ten days earlier, Russia’s government suspended all flights by its carriers in and out of Egypt on the basis of intelligence reports that a bomb might have destroyed the aircraft. That move came some 48 hours after the UK government stopped flights to and from Sharm El Sheikh. The governments of the Netherlands, France and Belgium all subsequently advised their nationals not to travel to and from Sharm El Sheikh.
The Egyptian government, clearly anxious to protect its tourism industry, still at the time hadn’t officially accepted the Russian conclusion, insisting that 10 months earlier it had bolstered security at Sharm El Sheikh Airport on the insistence of UK authorities. Not until this past February did Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi finally acknowledge that terrorists likely brought down the Metrojet A321. The country’s aviation authorities still have not issued a final report on the disaster. A preliminary report issued in December indicated that no evidence existed pointing to an act of terrorism.