Tel Aviv: Authorities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) shared a list of passengers and crew with Israel ahead of the flyDubai flight on which a pilot attempted to seize control of the Israel-bound aircraft and crash it, regional officials said Sunday, October 4. The disclosure raises new questions over how the attacker evaded detection.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later told the head of the National Security Council to appoint an examiner to review “all security aspects regarding foreign civil aviation to Israel.”
With the investigation into the flyDubai incident underway, preliminary details have highlighted several major security lapses. Officials have said the Omani co-pilot had been barred from flying by his own country because of concerns about his extremist views. It also remains unclear how a citizen of Oman, an Arab country that has no diplomatic relations with Israel, was allowed to fly a plane load of Israelis to Tel Aviv.
The UAE, which is leading the investigation, said the co-pilot attacked the flight’s captain with the cockpit’s crash axe and tried to take control of the plummeting plane in a “terrorist attack” on Wednesday. His actions nearly crashed the flight, which had 182 people on board, before the Indian captain managed to open the cockpit door, allowing passengers and others to rush in and subdue the attacker.
Israel did not raise concerns about passengers and crew
The regional officials said Emirati authorities had shared information about the passengers and crew, including their nationalities. Israel had not raised red flags on any passenger or crew member, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to reporters about the probe.
The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, said the Transportation Ministry is responsible for vetting passenger lists from foreign flights. Transportation Minister Miri Regev wrote on X that the security agencies are responsible for flight security and that her ministry was not given a list of passengers or any warnings.
Sharing the list is standard aviation procedure. But Dvir Rubenstien, head of aviation security at the Transportation Ministry, told Army Radio that the ministry relies on local security checks and does not have the tools to vet every passenger on every flight. The admission is striking for a country whose intelligence agency, Mossad, is known for its reach, yet no one flagged an Omani pilot with a history of extremism on a flight full of Israelis.
Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel has long-standing agreements with foreign carriers to keep pilots from flying into the country if they are citizens of nations that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel.
Australian police said Sunday that counterterrorism investigators were looking into the attacker’s possible connections to Australia.
The passengers who halted the attack and helped regain control of the aircraft have been hailed as heroes in Israel.
Questions raised about security failures
As the initial euphoria of the rescue has subsided, officials have begun to raise difficult questions and trade accusations over the security blunders that could have led to a major disaster.
Ahead of the elections at the end of the month, some opposition candidates have seized on the security failures to highlight what they see as negligence on the part of Netanyahu and his supporters. Regev is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a staunch supporter.
“This is exactly what system collapse looks like,” Yair Golan, head of the opposition Democrats party, wrote on X. “A transportation minister who completely abandons our skies, and a prime minister who abandons national security.”
It also remains unclear how flyDubai, a low-cost Emirati airline that operates flights between Israel and the UAE, failed to identify the Omani pilot as a security risk.
Philip Baum, a visiting professor of aviation security at Coventry University in England who wrote a book about aircraft hijackings and bombings, said background check systems differ from country to country and there are limits on what types of information can be shared.
“In terms of aviation security itself, obviously we want to have as robust background checks as possible. But there are huge limitations on doing background checks in any case, especially in cross-border checks,” he said.
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