An Air France plane which arrived at Moi International Airport, Mombasa, Kenya Sunday Dec. 20, 2015 to pick passengers after a bomb scare on their earlier flight from Mauritius.
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Frederic Gagey, chief of Air France, told a news conference that the suspected package turned out to have been made of paper and a timer.
Gagey praised the 14 crewmembers for keeping cool in the face of potential danger, the AP said, and added that he didn’t see this as a security lapse, pointing out that the bathrooms are checked before takeoff and passengers are checked and sometimes double-checked as the flight progresses. He said the airline planned to fly the passengers to Paris on another flight later yesterday.
A Kenyan police official has indicated that six passengers from the Boeing 777 were questioned, and CNN reports that four were ultimately arrested over the hoax.
Air France said in a statement that it had “immediately chose to reinforce the security measures in Mauritius” after the incident, which follows three bomb alerts in the USA in the last few weeks.
France national carrier also said on Monday it had taken legal action after the discovery of the fake bomb.
Mombasa County Commissioner Nelson Marwa said passengers had departed on another plane sent by Air France to pick them up.
Hours later, the device was declared a fake made of cardboard and a kitchen timer.
The Boeing 777, originally headed to Paris from the island of Mauritius, was diverted to Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa.
It tweeted pictures of the passengers eating lunch at a hotel and being briefed by Kenyan officials in a meeting room.
“We pay our captains to make good decisions and you’ve got to back them up”, said Robert Mann, a former airline executive who now is president of R.W. Mann & Company, Inc., an airline consulting firm in Port Washington, New York.
The 473 stranded passengers and crew were evacuated from the aircraft by slides. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for those attacks and for downing a plane October 31 carrying Russian tourists out of Egypt, killing all 224 people on board. Moscow has said that the crash was caused by a bomb on the plane.
Navy and police bomb experts were called in to determine if there were any explosives aboard the plane.
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Gagey said the crew was alerted, and the pilots informed. “I thought the plane had difficulty and not that it had anything to do with terrorism”.
