Questions remain about how a pilot managed to sneak a weapon aboard a plane and stab his fellow pilot before it plunged thousands of feet in mere seconds.The attacker was thwarted, passengers said, and the plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.“We were so scared.
We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Aviatar Alevi, a 17-year-old student, told NBC News on Wednesday after he and the rest of the passengers were flown to Tel Aviv.Here is what we know about the incident and how close it came to resulting in tragedy.
What did passengers see?Alevi described a harrowing scene aboard the flight, with people “screaming, running, panicking, blood.”“At the start, I thought it was a plane malfunction, but then I started hearing screaming about the stabbings,” he said.“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said, adding that the possibility of death “was definitely an option.” Another passenger, Motti Cohen Or, 70, said that he heard a woman shouting that “someone is stabbing someone in the cockpit” before the aircraft dived “toward the ground.”Yaniv Hayun was pictured in a bloody T-shirt telling cameras he had been among those to enter the cockpit and subdue the attacking pilot.
At Ben Gurion Airport, after the passengers had returned to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Hayun, whom he later identified as a plumber.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Yaniv Hayun on Wednesday.GPO via ReutersThree others helped in the effort to save the plane and those aboard, Hayun told reporters.
The group struggled to open the cockpit door.“I grabbed the attacker, and choked him, pulled him out first,” he said.
“I started pulling the controls.”“Thank God, we pulled it off.We really put our heads together and worked as a team,” he said.
“It was between fear and a sense of a do-or-die situation.”“We had to win.We had to pull through and come out on top,” he added.
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