LARNACA,Cyprus – Egypt’s ambassador to Cyprus said on Tuesday (March 29) that the hijacker appears to have been motivated by nothing more than a family feud and that all passengers were safe.
“The whole operation was going very well, from the very beginning, early in the morning around probably 8 o’clock until now, we were co-ordinating between the Egyptian and the Cypriot authorities,” said ambassador Hussein AbdelKarim Tantawy Mubarak.
“I think the hijacker is something that is more linked in our minds as something that has demands, but this gentleman who diverted the airplane really doesn’t have any demands. It looks like it was a family feud, this is from the information we have so far,” he added.
Eighty-one people, including 21 foreigners and 15 crew, were on board the Airbus 320, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said in a statement.
In the midst of the hijack, witnesses said he threw a letter on the apron (the tarmac in the bay where planes unload and load) at Cyprus’s Larnaca airport, written in Arabic, and asked that it be delivered to his Cypriot ex-wife.
After the aircraft landed at Larnaca, negotiations began and everyone on board was freed except three passengers and four crew, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fethy said.
Soon afterwards, Cypriot television footage showed several people leaving the plane via the stairs and another man climbing out of the cockpit window and running off.
The hijacker then surrendered to authorities.
The incident will deal another blow to Egypt’s tourism industry and hurt efforts to revive an economy hammered by political unrest following the 2011 uprising that ousted veteran ruler Hosni Mubarak