Air France: Suspicious device on flight was a hoax

When bomb experts examined the device further, they found that it was a cardboard box filled with paper and “something like a kitchen timer”.

Others on board were said to be so frightened they damaged the doors of the Boeing 777 jet once it landed in Mombasa in a desperate scramble to get out.

“All the information available to us at the moment indicates that the object was not capable of creating an explosion or damaging a plane”, Gagey told a news conference in the French capital.

Kenyan Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery told reporters at Mombasa’s Moi International Airport on Sunday that the authorities were in touch with Mauritius to find out how passengers had been screened. He said a safety check had been carried out in the toilets before the flight and denied any security failure.

Air France has been the target of anonymous threats at least three times since a terrorist attack in Paris on Nov 13 killed 130 people. The passengers were being flown to Paris on a special flight late Sunday.

A bomb scare that forced an Air France flight into an emergency landing in Kenya on Sunday (December 20) turned out to be a hoax.

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

Both the aircraft and airport were safely evacuated while the device was removed from the plane.

“We felt the crew member was pretty tense, something was probably wrong at that time”. Bomb squad officers took the device away where they confirmed it was a dummy bomb.

“We don’t know anything more about this bomb or not, but something that looked like a bomb was in the toilet”.

He said “a device suspected to be an explosive” had been found “in the lavatory”.

A suspicious device found on an Air France flight from Mauritius to Paris that prompted an emergency landing was harmless and caused a “false alarm”, the airline admitted.

One of those on board the aircraft, Benoit Lucchini, said passengers were calm and were told by the crew that the plane was being diverted because of a technical problem.

The Air France spokeswoman, who the Associated Press did not name, said local authorities were also interviewing passengers.

Passengers were reassured they would be on their way home within hours.