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Egyptian suspect remanded as hijacking sparks online buzz

– ‘Non-prohibited’ items –

H.A. Hellyer, an Arab affairs specialist at the Royal United Services Institute in London, tweeted: “My wife just told me: ‘You don’t love me enough. You haven’t hijacked a plane to talk to me. Sort it out’”

After several hours in Larnaca, passengers on the flight were flown to Cairo late on Tuesday.

“Fifteen minutes after departure we saw on the screens that the plane was not going to Cairo and it was crossing the sea,” passenger Noha Saleh said on arrival in the Egyptian capital.

“They said it was a technical problem and they needed to go to Cyprus or Greece to fix it… they were professional and their attitude was normal,” she said.

Concerns were raised about security at Egyptian airports after a Russian airliner was downed on October 31 over the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board. The Islamic State group claimed to have smuggled a bomb on board.

The police prosecutor said Cypriot authorities would seek the help of Interpol to discover how the fake suicide belt passed through airport security in Alexandria.

But Egypt’s interior ministry said in a statement that all security measures had been applied.

The accused hijacker and his luggage were scanned, it said, and he had used “non-prohibited belongings” in his handbag “to imply that he was wearing an explosive belt and to threaten the crew and passengers.”

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