Four aspiring clock makers. Update to this previous story.
Via Daily Mail:
Four people have been arrested after a hoax bomb was found in the toilet of an Air France flight from Mauritius to Paris which was forced to divert to Kenya.
The Boeing 777 landed in Mombasa after a passenger reported the suspicious device.
A technical examination of the device found it did not contain any explosives.
The flight was carrying 459 passengers and 14 crew members when pilots requested an emergency landing at a Mombasa airport at 9.30pm GMT.
However, nearly 20 hours after the emergency landing, Air France have now confirmed that the device was a fake bomb made of cardboard and a timer, possibly designed to start panic.
‘After analysis it has been indicated that (the bomb scare) was a false alarm,’ Air France chief executive Frederic Gagey told a press conference in Paris.
‘All the information we have at this stage shows that the object was not capable of causing an explosion that would damage the plane but was rather a mixture of cardboard, pieces of paper as well as a timer,’ he said.
The Kenyan Airport Authority had previously published a statement on social media confirming that the device was a bomb, but later edited the post to only confirm a ‘suspicious object’.
A Kenyan police official said during the flight a passenger noticed something in a lavatory that looked like ‘a stopwatch mounted on a box.’
The passenger reported the device to the cabin crew, who informed the pilots, leading to an emergency landing at the airport in the Kenyan city of Mombasa.
Six people are being questioned by authorities, one of them being the man who reported the package.
Kenyan police spokesman Charles Owino said: ‘The plane requested an emergency landing after a device suspected to be a bomb was discovered in the lavatory.
‘An emergency landing was prepared and it landed safely and all passengers evacuated.‘Bomb experts from the Navy and the criminal investigations department were called in, and took the device.’
Mr Owino said it was a ‘dummy bomb’ designed to create fear on the plane.
Interior minister Joseph Nkaissery told reporters at Mombasa’s Moi International Airport that Kenyan authorities were working with their French and Mauritian counterparts to determine the nature of the device.
He confirmed that a number of passengers who were aboard the flight were being questioned about the suspect device, but did not say if they were under arrest.
‘We are in touch with Mauritius to know how security screening of passengers was done. A few passengers are being interrogated,’ he said.
The Boeing 777 Air France flight 463 was heading to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris when the pilots requested an emergency landing at the Moi International Airport at 12.30am, police spokesman Charles Owino said.