Space For Rent
Wednesday, March 30, 2016, Chaitra 16, 1422 BS, Jamadius Sani 20, 1437 Hijri


Cyprus airport standoff ends, EgyptAir hijacker surrenders
He reportedly makes a number of rambling demands including visiting his estranged Cypriot ex-wife, with whom he has children
Published :Wednesday, 30 March, 2016,  Time : 12:00 AM  View Count : 17
LARNACA, Mar 29 : An Egyptian man who hijacked an EgyptAir flight and forced it to divert to Cyprus demanding to see his ex-wife surrendered on Tuesday after a six-hour airport standoff ended peacefully.
The hijacker, described by officials as "unstable", had claimed to be wearing a bomb belt but no explosives were discovered after he gave himself up at Larnaca airport and was arrested.
Most of the 55 passengers were quickly released after the plane had landed but some escaped only minutes before the hijacker surrendered, including one man who climbed out a cockpit window.
"This is not about terrorism. This is about the individual action of a person who is psychologically unstable," said the Cypriot foreign ministry's permanent secretary, Alexandros Zenon. The Egyptian interior ministry identified the man as Seif al-Din Mohamed Mostafa.
The man had reportedly dropped a letter in Arabic on the tarmac, making a number of rambling demands including to see his Cypriot ex-wife, with whom he has children.
Police said she had been brought to the airport along with a child but provided no further details. 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." After searching the hijacker and sending sniffer dogs into the plane, Cypriot police said no bombs had been found.
The EgyptAir plane, which had been headed from the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria to Cairo, landed in Larnaca at 8:50 am (0550 GMT), 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.
Egypt's Prime Minister Sharif Ismail said in televised remarks that the hijacker was an Egyptian and had demanded to speak to a European Union representative.

Cockpit window escape
Egyptian civil aviation officials said there were 21 foreigners among the passengers, and that the hijacker had demanded the plane land in either Turkey or Cyprus.
They included eight Americans, four Dutch citizens, four Britons and a French citizen, according to the Egyptian authorities.
Nearly all of the passengers were able to disembark shortly after the plane landed, but Egypt's civil aviation minister Sherif Fathy told a press conference that the captain, a co-pilot, a flight attendant and a security guard, along with three passengers, had remained on board.
They were later seen exiting the aircraft, with several descending the steps from the plane and one clambering out of a cockpit window and dropping to the ground.
A man then emerged, walked across the tarmac and raised his hands to two waiting counter-terrorism officers. They laid him on the ground and searched him for around two minutes before taking him away. ?AFP









Editor : Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury
Published by the Editor on behalf of the Observer Ltd. from Globe Printers, 24/A, New Eskaton Road, Ramna, Dhaka. Editorial, News and Commercial Offices : Aziz Bhaban (2nd floor), 93, Motijheel C/A, Dhaka-1000. Phone :9586651-58. Fax: 9586659-60, Advertisemnet: 9513663, E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].