The Omani co-pilot who tried to hijack an Israel-bound flight was a radical Islamist on a suicide mission to down the plane and kill all 174 people on board, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday.
The co-pilot, who has not been named publicly, “underwent Islamist radical indoctrination” before he attacked his Indian lead pilot in the cockpit on the flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, Netanyahu told “Fox & Friends.”
The attacker was subdued and tied up with a headphone cord by “superhero” pᴀssengers after the attack — and then started begging for the flight crew to “kill me, kill me,” according to the prime minister.
“So it’s clear he was suicidal,” Netanyahu said. “That’s not a question. It was clear he was going to down that plane.”
However, it is “too early” to determine whether the co-pilot had ties to Iran, the Israeli leader stressed.
The accused extremist stabbed pilot Smit Machchhar in the head and arm — which was “basically split in two” — about 2.5 hours into the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, Netanyahu said.
The staffer had reportedly worked for Flydubai for less than a year — but Netanyahu questioned how he was allowed to fly into Israel in the first place, given strict restrictions.
“He was an Omani national and we have constraints that say you can’t have pilots … from countries that don’t have diplomatic relations with Israel,” Netanyahu said.
“Obviously there was a loophole here, and we’re taking care of that, among other things,” he vowed.
It also remains under investigation whether the co-pilot attacked the pilot with a knife he brought on board or with an axe he took from the plane’s standard emergency equipment, he said.
Netanyahu said it’s still “too early” to determine whether the co-pilot had ties to Iran, which has been at war with Israel since February, but he was confident the man’s connections would be revealed in a matter of days.
The Boeing 737 Max was cruising at about 34,000 feet at the time and the jet plummeted 17,000 feet over the Arabian Desert in just two minutes, according to Israeli media.
Netanyahu lauded the ordinary Israeli citizens who “became superheroes” and jumped into action to save the pilot, subdue the suspected terrorist and miraculously land the plane safely.
“This is Hollywood on steroids — you can’t make this up, you can’t believe that it actually happened in real life, but it did,” the Israeli leader said.