Air France passengers arrive in Paris after Kenya bomb scare

The couple was taken into custody by border police upon their return to France, one day after the Air France Boeing 777 from Mauritius to Paris was diverted to Kenya.

The BBC adds that the plane, carrying 459 passengers and 14 crew, had left Mauritius at 01:00 and had been due to fly directly to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

In May, 26-year-old Colin Gibson was jailed for 16 months for making a series of calls to police in Newcastle claiming to be an Isil member who had planted bombs at Newcastle Central Station. Larry is our main news editor.

The airline said it had filed a complaint for “reckless endangerment” over the incident.

One of the passengers on the flight, Benoit Lucchini, described the landing, “The plane just went down slowly, slowly, slowly, so we just realized probably something was wrong”.

The hoax – the fourth against Air France in recent weeks – comes amid heightened concerns about extremist violence in many countries, and aggravated passenger jitters around the Christmas holiday season. A court official declined to comment on other avenues of investigation into the device, which was made of cardboard, paper and a household timer and contained no explosives. “Because of the speed of the airplane going down, we thought we would crash in the sea”, said passenger Marine Gorlier of the French town of Melun after landing at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Claude Moniquet, founder of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center in Brussels, said he’s aware of alerts concerning Polish, Turkish, Canadian and German flights since the Paris attacks, though the Mauritius hoax stands out as unlikely to have been improvised after an on-board spat.

He said that a safety check was carried out in the bathroom before the flight and denied any security failure in the flight. “So we secured the seat belt to land in Mombasa because we thought it was a technical problem, but actually it was not a technical problem”.

Passengers were evacuated off emergency slides in Mombasa when a suspicious parcel with timer attached was found in the toilet of the Paris-bound flight.

An Air France service from San Francisco to Paris was grounded in Montreal earlier this month after another threat.

Gagey said crew members had also indicated that in their routine check of the plane before the flight, the cupboard had been empty.