Photo credit: The Mirro
A brave six-year-old girl and her mother played a vital role in thwarting an alleged attempted hijacking on a FlyDubai flight bound for Israel.
Mirror reports that Nina Manes was on the plane when chaos erupted, having boarded with her mother, Tali and father, Tzika, on the way to Tel Aviv from Dubai.
Nina had asked her mother to go with her to the bathroom at the exact moment the co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain in an attempt to take control of the plane.
Her mother heard suspicious noises coming from the cockpit.
“There was blood all over the cockpit and very, very sharp fighting moves,” she told Israeli Channel 12.
“I screamed, ‘He is stabbing the pilot, he is stabbing the pilot, come help!’ People looked at me and didn’t understand.”
Nina’s father, Tzika, then rushed to grab his daughter from the bathroom. He said, “The shrieks of my daughters when the plane nosedived [are still with me]. They said, ‘Dad, we don’t want to die.’ [Their cries] were the triggers that caused me to run inside the cockpit.”
In the chaos that began about two and a half hours after takeoff, the flight descended from 33,000ft to 17,000ft in about a minute, then made an erratic circle near the Jordanian border and landed in Tabuk, according to Flightradar24. The site identified the aircraft as a Boeing 737 Max 8.
Video shot inside the plane by Shota Musayev, a dentist who treated the captain, shows the copilot on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back.
Captain Smit Machhhar, widely praised as one of the flight’s heroes, was reportedly in stable condition, the Indian Embassy in Saudi Arabia said overnight.
A regional official briefed on the investigation said the suspect, an Omani citizen, was under arrest and confirmed that Saudi authorities were working with countries, including Israel, to try to determine a motive.
He said the UAE, the United States and Oman were also involved.
