UAE calls the Flydubai cockpit axe attack an attempted terrorist act

The United Arab Emirates has now put a legal name on what happened in the cockpit of Flydubai flight FZ1073. Prosecutor General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said on Saturday that the co-pilot attacked the captain with the crash axe kept on the flight deck and tried to take control of the aircraft, and that the act was an attempted terrorist attack. The comments, carried by the state news agency WAM, were the first time Emirati authorities used that charge in public.

The flight left Dubai for Tel Aviv. Accounts of the load differ by a few seats. Reuters and the BBC put the number above 170 passengers and crew. The National reported 172. The Associated Press, citing people familiar with the case, put it at 182. What the accounts agree on is the sequence. Partway into the flight the aircraft dropped sharply. The National said the loss of altitude was about 14,000 feet. The BBC said about 17,000 feet, or 5,200 metres. Two and a half hours after departure, by the BBC's timing, people outside the cockpit had already heard sounds that did not belong on a normal sector.

Captain Smit Machchhar was the man on the controls. He was stabbed and badly wounded. From a hospital bed in Abu Dhabi he later told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that he had been fighting for his life. He has also said he used what strength he had left to unlock the cockpit door from the inside. That single motion is what let other people in. Passengers and a reserve Flydubai pilot who was travelling on the flight overpowered the co-pilot. The reserve pilot then flew the Boeing 737 to Tabuk, in north-western Saudi Arabia, and landed it. Saudi authorities detained the attacker.

The co-pilot has been identified by people with knowledge of the inquiry, including a Gulf diplomat and a Western diplomat, as Hamam al-Hammami, also rendered Hammam al-Hammami, an Omani national. Reuters said a source with direct knowledge gave the same name, and that UAE authorities had not immediately confirmed it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu separately described the attacker as Omani. Netanyahu told Fox News that after the co-pilot was subdued he called out to the crew, "Kill me, kill me," and that the episode looked like an attempt to bring the aircraft down. He also said the man had undergone Islamist indoctrination. Those claims sit with the Israeli prime minister. They are not findings of the UAE prosecutor.

A separate person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press that Oman had already barred the co-pilot from flying over concern that he had adopted extremist views, and that Flydubai hired him after that bar. The person spoke anonymously because the investigation is open. Flydubai has said the circumstances are still under investigation and that it is not in a position to comment further.

Al Shamsi said the inquiry is still open on motive and on whether anyone else was involved. That is the part that matters beyond the cabin. A crash axe is standard equipment on a flight deck, there to break through panels in a fire or a jammed exit. It is not a weapon in the security model, because the security model assumes the two people inside the locked door are the defence, not the threat. Regulators have spent two decades hardening the door against people coming in from the cabin. They have spent much less time on what happens when one of the two pilots is the attacker and the other is on the floor.

The Tabuk diversion also fixes the jurisdiction map. The aircraft is Emirati-registered and operated by a Dubai carrier. The landing, the detention and the first physical evidence sat in Saudi Arabia. The co-pilot's licence history, if the account of an Omani bar is confirmed, sits in Muscat. The destination was Israel, which is why Netanyahu spoke early and why the flight itself was politically exposed before anyone picked up an axe. Al Shamsi's decision to call it terrorism pulls the case out of ordinary aviation incident procedure and into a criminal file that can ask for records from more than one state.

Machchhar's account, given while he was still injured, is the only detailed public description from inside the cockpit. He said he was on the floor, realised the aircraft was descending, and told himself to make one last push for the door. The people who came through that door included a pilot who was not rostered to fly the sector. That is an awkward fact for any airline. Reserve crew on a positioning ticket are not part of the operating plan. On FZ1073 they were the reason the aircraft reached a runway.

None of the public statements has yet given the exact time of the attack, the heading at the moment of the drop, or whether the autopilot was disconnected. Those are the numbers a final report would normally carry. Until they appear, the usable record is the prosecutor's charge, the captain's description of the door, the landing at Tabuk, and a name that official UAE channels have not yet confirmed.