Australian police open a check on the flydubai co-pilot's years in Melbourne

Australian Federal Police have opened a check on links in Australia of the co-pilot accused of attacking the captain of flydubai flight FZ1073. A police spokesperson said on Sunday that a multi-agency counterterrorism unit was looking at those links. Sources told the Associated Press that the co-pilot studied at RMIT University in Melbourne about a decade ago and left without finishing an engineering course. The university has said the student did not complete the programme.

The flight is the one that left Dubai for Tel Aviv on 30 September. UAE Attorney-General Hamad al-Shamsi said on Saturday that the co-pilot tried to carry out a terrorist act and wounded the captain with the cockpit crash axe. The Boeing 737 MAX dropped sharply and landed at Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia. A reserve flydubai pilot who was travelling as a passenger took control. The co-pilot was held in Saudi Arabia and transferred to the UAE on Thursday. Most of the passengers were Israeli.

The name, and who has used it

Two sources have named the co-pilot as an Omani national, Hamam al-Hammami. Israeli officials have said he is from Oman and have not used the name in public. The UAE and flydubai have not confirmed it. Any Australian inquiry is therefore running on a name that the prosecuting state has not published. That is a practical limit. A university record can be checked against a name. A charge cannot be laid in Melbourne against a man who is in custody in the UAE, and the AFP has not said it is seeking one.

What the Australian check can do is narrower. It can establish whether the man who studied at RMIT is the man now held, whether he had associates here, and whether anyone in Australia had contact with him in the period before 30 September. TimesLIVE, citing the police spokesperson, said investigators were looking at links to radical mosques and extremist material during his time in the country. Those are allegations carried by that report. The AFP statement itself, as quoted, said the unit was investigating links. It did not publish a list of mosques or sites.

What is already on the UAE file

The prosecutor's account is the charging story. The co-pilot used the emergency crash axe on the captain. Captain Smit Machchhar was wounded. The aircraft, with 174 passengers and six crew on the earlier public count, lost altitude near the Saudi-Jordan border and landed at Tabuk. Israeli officials told reporters on Monday that the co-pilot said he had planned to crash the jet into Ben Gurion or a Tel Aviv tower. The UAE has not confirmed that statement, or the name. NDTV reported that he had planned the attack for July and that something stopped him then. That report is not a prosecutorial finding.

The Australian thread is new because it is a second jurisdiction. The act was in the air, the landing was in Saudi Arabia, the custody is in the UAE, and the passenger load was largely Israeli. A university record in Melbourne adds a fourth country to the file without moving the defendant. RMIT's confirmation that he left without a degree is a fact about a student. It is not a fact about a plot. The plot, on the public record, is what the UAE prosecutor has called a terrorist act and what Israeli officials say he described after landing.

What the check will not settle

An AFP inquiry into old links does not decide the cockpit case. That case sits with the UAE prosecutor, who has the man, the axe, the wounded captain and the flight data. The Australian question is whether the years in Melbourne left people, places or material that belong in that file. Until the AFP says what it found, the firm additions are the inquiry itself, the RMIT enrolment that ended without a degree, and a name that diplomats and sources use and that Abu Dhabi has not confirmed.

The open question is whether the university record and the man in custody are the same person on a document the UAE will accept. If they are, Melbourne becomes part of the evidence brief. If the name is wrong, the AFP is checking the wrong file, and the Omani identification still rests on sources rather than on a charge sheet.