A suspicious device that forced an Air France plane en route from Mauritius to Paris to make an emergency landing in Mombasa was a false alarm, the airline’s chief executive officer has said.
Flight AF463, with 459 passengers and 14 crew members on board, had left Mauritius at 9pm local time (1700 GMT) on Saturday and was due to arrive in Paris Charles de Gaulle at 5.50am (0450 GMT).
After the suspicious device was discovered, the plane landed at Moi international airport in Mombasa before 1am.
Cool-headed reaction
Air France chief executive, Fr?d?ric Gagey, told a news conference a decision was made to land at the closest airport able to handle a Boeing 777 aircraft after a passenger found the object in the toilets.
“All the information available to us at the moment indicates that the object was not capable of creating an explosion or damaging a plane, but was rather a mixture of cardboard, sheets of paper and a timer,” he said and added: “It was a false alarm.”
Those on board were evacuated via the emergency slides. Gagey congratulated the crew for their cool-headed reaction to divert the plane. He said a safety check had been carried out in the toilets before the flight and denied any security failure.
Passengers questioned
A Kenyan police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the device looked like a cardboard box with a stopwatch taped to it. He said six passengers were being questioned in relation to it, including the man who raised the alarm.
Passengers who were on board AF463 taken by bus from Moi international airport after the emergency landing.
Passengers who were on board an Air France Boeing 777 aircraft that made an emergency landing are seen on a bus as they are escorted to hotels from Moi international airport in Mombasa.
An Air France spokesman said the passengers on the aborted flight were all being accommodated in a nearby hotel and they would depart from Mombasa at 6pm on Sunday on a new aircraft dispatched from Paris, arriving in the capital at 7am on Monday.
Suspicious object
The Kenyan Airport Authority had posted a statement on Facebook on Sunday morning in which it described the suspect package as a bomb that “has been taken to safe destination for detonation in the morning”, but later deleted the post and replaced it as one referring only to a “suspicious object”.
Scheduled flights to Mombasa were initially disrupted but normal operations later resumed.
Flight AF463 is the third Air France plane to be diverted in recent weeks. Two flights from the US to Paris were diverted on 18 November after bomb threats were received but no bombs were found. France has been in a state of emergency since the 13 November attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead and hundreds wounded.
Islamic State extremists claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris as well as for the 31 October crash of a Russian passenger plane in the Sinai desert that killed all 224 people on board. Moscow says the crash was caused by a bomb on the plane and has demanded that Egypt increase security at all its airports.
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