The arrest is part of an investigation prompted by a legal complaint filed by Air France on Monday for reckless endangerment.
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Fortunately, he said, most airlines have in-house security experts who can readily distinguish a genuine bomb from an amateurishly-made fake.
The man claimed he found the suspicious device on board the aircraft, forcing Flight 463 to divert to the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa early Sunday, but his story didn’t add up, the spokesman added.
Authorities later discovered a fake explosive, rigged with cardboard, sheets of paper and a household timer, and declared it a hoax. He denied any security failure in the flight, saying that passengers are checked and sometimes double-checked on flights.
Meanwhile, all the passengers were evacuated before the suspicious device was taken out of the lavatory. Instead, people were told the plane had a technical problem and would be landing in Kenya instead of Paris.
“The plane just went down slowly, slowly, slowly, so we just realized probably something was wrong”, CBS quotes Lucchini. An Air France service from San Francisco to Paris was grounded in Montreal earlier this month after another call. So they keep everybody calm.
The company said it doesn’t know who prepared the package and how it got into the aircraft restroom. “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”.
France has been in a state of emergency since Islamic extremist attacks November 13 in Paris killed 130 people and left hundreds wounded.
The incident on an aircraft that was carrying 473 passengers and crew follows a series of anonymous telephone calls that led to the diversion of three Air France flights departing the United States for Paris over the past 4 1/2 weeks. It is thought it was constructed while the plane was in the air. Moscow has said that the crash was caused by a bomb on the plane. All passengers were evacuated using emergency slides and were given hotel accommodations for the night.
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Last Tuesday, the two biggest school systems in the US – New York City and Los Angeles – received threats of a large-scale jihadi attack.
