TEL AVIV — The pilot who allegedly tried to shoot down a flight to Israel was planning a 9/11-style attack by crashing into the country’s main airport in Tel Aviv, a Middle East official told NBC News.
The pilot, identified by NBC News as Hamman al-Hamammi, told investigators Monday that he wanted to escape Israeli defenses and crash into Ben Gurion Airport or another building, said the official, who requested anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly.
An Omani citizen, several sources from three agencies briefed on the investigation and a diplomat in the Middle East identified al-Hammami. Authorities have not officially released the identity.
He is currently being questioned by UAE investigators following his transfer from Saudi Arabia. The flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was diverted to an airport in Saudi Arabia, where it landed safely, after last week’s dramatic in-flight incident.
Emirati authorities said on Saturday that the pilot attacked fellow pilot Captain Smit Machchhar with an ax and tried to take control of the plane’s flight controls.
The plane carrying 174 passengers, most of them Israeli, then plunged 14,000 feet in just 29 seconds, according to data from aerial tracking service Flightradar24, causing panic on board.
Machchhar, an Indian national and 17-year veteran pilot, said in a call Friday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his fellow pilot told him he was going to pray, which he did not consider unusual since practicing Muslims pray five times a day.
A few minutes later, he said he felt a violent blow to the head. “Because of his first shots, my vision was almost zero and I was completely blurry,” he added. “The next feeling I had was that the plane was descending sharply.”
A video of the call was released by Netanyahu’s office.
At first, Machchhar said he thought the plane had suffered “catastrophic damage,” but once the hits continued, he “realized it wasn’t the plane, but the other guy who was in the cockpit with me.”
In another call with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, also on Friday, Machchhar said he managed to open the cockpit door on the second attempt, despite being hit by rain.
“I gave everything I had, walked up to the door and opened the door. And luckily people were waiting to react,” he said.
Attention focused on missed safety signals before the flight.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that al-Hammami had “previously been banned from flying by Oman over concerns that he had espoused radical ideological views.”
It is unclear how a citizen of Oman, an Arab country with no diplomatic relations with Israel, was allowed to pilot the plane carrying Israelis to Tel Aviv.
Under Israeli law, airlines must provide information about passengers and crew members, including their names and nationalities, up to 48 hours before a flight.
Netanyahu called on the head of the National Security Council to appoint a reviewer to examine “all security aspects” of Israeli civil aviation following the incident.
Separately, Vice President JD Vance highlighted concerns over potential security breaches.
“This person should not have been flying an airline, and so we are certainly looking at our procedures in the United States to make sure that people who are obviously at risk of flying are not getting behind the wheel of an airplane,” he told a reporter at Joint Base Andrews on Monday.
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