Fake bomb prompts emergency landing of Air France flight

Instead, people were told the plane had a technical problem and would be landing in Kenya instead of Paris.

AirFrance CEO Frederic Gagey said the suspicious object must have been planted during the flight.

“All the information available to us at the moment indicates that the object was not capable of creating an explosion or damaging a plane”, Mr Gagey said in Paris.

The object was analyzed and found to contain no explosives, the airline said. The homemade apparatus rigged with cardboard, sheets of paper and a household timer was discovered hidden in a lavatory cabinet on a flight from Mauritius to Paris. The attacks were claimed by Islamic State militants.

“Bomb experts from the Navy and DCI (Directorate of Criminal Investigations) have retrieved the device and are determining whether the components contained explosives”, Boinnet said.

The suspects boarded the plane in Mauritius and were headed to Paris, France.

A Kenyan police official has indicated that six passengers from the Boeing 777 were questioned, and CNN reports that four were ultimately arrested over the hoax. “The Kenyan security is zeroing in on two passengers who appear suspicious”. The pilots made a decision to land at the nearest airport.

Gagey said the crew was alerted, and the pilots informed. “I thought the plane had difficulty and not that it had anything to do with terrorism”.

Flight AF 463 left the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius at 9:00 pm on Saturday and had been due to arrive at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport at 5:50 am Sunday. The airline has sent a substitute plane to pick up the passengers. They were just wonderful. After the plane landed, they told us to run to the chutes, and to keep going, far from the plane.

Here’s what we know now.

He spoke to journalists in Mombasa after getting off the plane.

“The airport was sealed off by security personnel after the emergency landing”, Rajan quoted the official as saying.

“You don’t want them to panic while it’s in the air”, he said.

Police spokesman Charles Owino says the device was discovered in a lavatory of the Boeing 777.

Gagey said the 473 stranded passengers and crew, who had been evacuated from the aircraft by slides, then accommodated at a hotel in Mombasa, would travel on to France in the next few hours.

Kenya Airports Authority added that scheduled flights to Mombasa were disrupted during the interval but that normal operations have resumed.