UAE prosecutor says the flydubai co-pilot used the cockpit crash axe

The United Arab Emirates prosecutor general said on Saturday that the co-pilot of flydubai flight FZ1073 tried to carry out a terrorist attack with the cockpit crash axe. The finding answers the question investigators had left open since Wednesday: the weapon did not have to be smuggled through security. A crash axe is kept in the cockpit for fires and forced exits.

Hamad Saif Al Shamsi's statement, carried by the state agency WAM, is the first time Emirati authorities have used the words terrorist attack for the flight. He said the co-pilot attacked the captain inside the cockpit with the axe and tried to take control of the aircraft. The inquiry into motive and into any links is still open. Final results, he said, will come when the procedures are finished. Physical and digital evidence is still being examined.

The flight was FZ1073, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 from Dubai to Tel Aviv on 30 September, with more than 170 people on board. The Guardian put the load at 182. Over Saudi Arabia the co-pilot stabbed Captain Smit Machchhar. The jet dropped from cruise, by one account 16,625 feet in just over 30 seconds, and part of the rudder was torn off. Passengers and crew, including an off-duty pilot, forced the door and landed at Tabuk. No one died. Saudi officers arrested the co-pilot.

Machchhar has described lying injured on the cockpit floor, seeing the descent, and making a last push to open the door from inside so people in the cabin could reach him. That account is what made the axe finding concrete. A man on the floor cannot both fly and hold the door. The axe is a short tool, stored where only the crew can reach it in normal operations. Using it does not require a checkpoint failure. It requires a person who is already on the flight-deck roster.

Reuters reported, from a source with direct knowledge and a second source briefed on the inquiry, that the co-pilot is Hammam al-Hammami, an Omani national. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already said the attacker was Omani, and he said the man had gone through Islamist radical indoctrination and looked set on bringing the aircraft down. The Wall Street Journal reported that Oman had barred him from flying over extremist views while he was at Oman Air, and that he was moved to another role. A Gulf diplomat told the Associated Press that investigators were still asking whether he acted alone. Oman has not commented. The UAE has not confirmed the name.

The official gap is the one to watch. Al Shamsi has classified the act and identified the tool. He has not, in the WAM text, named the man or announced a charge. Saudi Arabia holds the suspect. The UAE regulator opened its own inquiry in the days after the landing, and flydubai suspended Tel Aviv flights for six days. Saturday's statement moves the case from an apparent cockpit assault to a prosecutor's terrorism finding, without closing the question of direction from anyone else.

For airlines, the axe detail changes the security argument. A search at the crew gate would not have caught a tool the aircraft already carries. Cockpit access rules, the two-person rule, and how a crash axe is locked are the controls that match this method. None of those rules has been rewritten in public since Wednesday. The prosecutor has said what was used. He has not said who, if anyone, told the co-pilot to use it.