TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Authorities in United Arab Emirates shared with Israel a list of passengers and crew ahead of the FlyDubai flight on which a pilot attempted to take control of the Israel-bound plane and crash it, regional officials said Sunday, raising new questions about how the attacker evaded detection.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then asked the head of the National Security Council to appoint a reviewer to examine “all security aspects regarding foreign civil aviation to Israel.”
While the investigation into the FlyDubai incident is ongoing, preliminary details have highlighted several major security flaws. Officials have previously said the Omani co-pilot had was banned from flying by his own country due to concerns over his extremist views. It is also unclear how a citizen of Oman, an Arab country that has no diplomatic relations with Israel, was allowed to transport a plane full of Israelis to Tel Aviv.
The United Arab Emirates, which is leading the investigation, said the co-pilot attacked the captain with the cockpit ax and tried to take control of the plane. plane in free fall during a “terrorist attack” on Wednesday. His actions nearly caused the flight with 182 people on board to crash before the Indian captain managed to open the cockpit door, allowing passengers and others rush and subdue the attacker.
Israel has not raised concerns about passengers and crew
Regional officials said Emirati authorities shared information about the passengers and crew, including their nationalities. Israel did not alert any passengers or crew members, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters about the investigation.
The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said the Transportation Ministry was responsible for checking passenger lists on foreign flights. Transport Minister Miri Regev said on X that security agencies were responsible for flight safety and that her ministry had not received any passenger lists or warnings.
Sharing the list is a standard aviation procedure. But the head of aviation security at the Transport Ministry, Dvir Rubenstien, told Army Radio that the ministry relies on local security checks and does not have the tools or capacity to screen every passenger on every flight.
Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel has long-standing agreements with foreign carriers to prevent pilots from flying into the country if they are citizens of countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel.
Australian police said Sunday that counterterrorism investigators were looking into the attacker’s possible links to Australia, where media reported he obtained a student visa to study at university about a decade ago. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology said Monday that he had been enrolled at the school for a time but did not complete an engineering degree.
The passengers who stopped the attack and helped regain control of the plane were hailed as heroes in Israel.
Questions raised about security breaches
But as the initial euphoria of the rescue subsided, officials began raising tough questions and trading accusations about safety mistakes that could have led to a major disaster.
As elections approach later this month, some opposition candidates have used security failures to highlight what they see as negligence on the part of Netanyahu and his supporters. Transportation Minister Regev is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a strong supporter.
“This is exactly what the collapse of the system looks like,” Yair Golan, head of the opposition Democratic Party, wrote on X. “A Transport Minister who completely abandons our skies and a Prime Minister who abandons national security.”
It is also unclear how FlyDubai, a low-cost Emirati airline that operates flights between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, failed to identify the Omani pilot as posing a security risk.
Philip Baum, a visiting professor of aviation security at Coventry University in England who has written a book on hijackings and bombings, said background check systems differ from country to country and there are limits to the types of information that can be shared.
“In terms of aviation security itself, obviously we want to have background checks that are as rigorous as possible. But there are huge limitations on background checks anyway, particularly during cross-border screenings,” he said.
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Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, contributed to this report.
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