Australia Investigates the Flydubai Co-Pilot as the Weapon Is Confirmed
Australian counter-terrorism officers are investigating the Flydubai co-pilot’s links to the country, the federal police confirmed on Sunday. The United Arab Emirates’ attorney general, Hamad Saif al-Shamsi, has said the man attacked the captain with a crash axe kept in the cockpit for emergencies. The aircraft, carrying 182 people from Dubai to Tel Aviv on 30 September, fell 16,625 feet in little over thirty seconds.
The weapon had been the open question. Passenger accounts had suggested a knife; the axe is standard cockpit equipment on an airliner, which makes the attack a failure of vetting rather than of screening. The Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team, which brings together the Australian Federal Police, Victoria Police and the domestic intelligence service ASIO, said it “is investigating the man’s links to Australia” and would provide an update “at an appropriate time”. He held an Australian student visa from 2014, studied there from 2015 to 2017, and had it cancelled in 2019 once he was no longer enrolled; he later took a three-year distance-learning aviation management degree at Buckinghamshire New University, graduating in 2023, and the university says he did no flight training there. The detail that will matter most to the airline is earlier still: Oman is reported to have barred him from flying over concerns he had adopted extremist views, and moved him to an administrative post at Oman Air, before Flydubai hired him. The captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, was stabbed and is reported stable after being flown to Abu Dhabi; two reserve pilots landed the aircraft in Saudi Arabia. He said afterwards that he told himself “to go for one last push to open the door from inside”. Dubai to Tel Aviv flights are suspended. Watch whether Oman’s prior ban was ever disclosed.