UAE had shared details about FlyDubai flight with Israel

In this photo provided by the Government of Dubai Media Office, Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, left, visits injured Indian Flydubai Capt. Smit Machchhar at a hospital in Abu Dhabi [AP Photo]

Authorities in the United Arab Emirates shared with Israel a list of passengers and crew 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 (yesterday, Macau time), raising 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 already 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 planeload 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 ax and tried to take control of the plummeting plane in a “terrorist attack” Wednesday. His actions nearly crashed the flight with 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.

The regional officials said Emirati authorities had shared information about the passengers and crew, including their nationalities. Israel hadn’t raised red flags on any passenger or member of the crew, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized 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 on X said the security agencies are responsible for flight security and that her ministry wasn’t given a list of passengers or any warnings.

Sharing the list is standard aviation procedure. But the head of aviation security at the Transportation Ministry, Dvir Rubenstien, told Army Radio that the ministry relies on local security checks and does not have the tools or the ability to run checks on each passenger on every flight.

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 don’t maintain diplomatic relations with Israel.

Australian police said Sunday that counterterrorism investigators were looking into the attacker’s possible connections to Australia, where media have reported he went on a student visa to study at university about a decade ago. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology said Monday he was enrolled at the school for a time but did not successfully complete an engineering qualification.

The passengers who halted the attack and helped regain control of the aircraft have been hailed as heroes in Israel.

But as the initial euphoria of the rescue has subsided, officials have begun to raise difficult questions and trade accusations about 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 perceive as negligence on the part of Netanyahu and his supporters. Transportation Minister 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, had 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. MELANIE LIDMAN & SAMY MAGDY, TEL AVIV, MDT/AP