“Our people, they were talking to him all the time in order to keep him busy and allow people to come out,” Nikos Christodoulides, a government spokesman, told NBC news. It took more than an hour for Parashkou to appear at the airport, reportedly with a small child in tow.Ĭypriot officials, announcing that the letter had been translated and handed to her, said Parashkou’s wish was to participate in negotiations between Mustafa and the police. In addition to seeing his erstwhile wife, Mustafa was also now demanding that female prisoners be released in Egypt. The British Foreign Office later said it was offering assistance to four British nationals. The hostages included Britons, Americans, Italians, Dutch, French and Belgians. Seven crew members and at least five foreign nationals were still being held by the man, supposedly wearing an explosive vest. In Larnaca counterterrorism officials, now several hours into the siege, were far from calm. Mustafa was eventually identified when Samaha’s enraged wife contacted the Egyptian media to say her husband was a passenger on his way to Cairo to change flights and was “certainly not the hijacker”. The plot thickened when Egyptian authorities initially identified the hijacker as Ibrahim Samaha, describing him as a university professor en route to a conference at the University of Atlanta. Terrorists are crazy but they aren’t stupid. In Cairo an official at the ministry of foreign affairs also ruled out terrorism, saying: “He’s not a terrorist, he’s an idiot. “In any case it’s all to do with a woman,” he said, before insisting that everything was being done to release the hostages.ĮgyptAir hijack: what we know – video explainer Guardian Instead, he hinted, the episode appeared to be personal in nature and was linked to a Cypriot woman, subsequently named as Marina Parashkou, with whom the hijacker had once been involved. Addressing reporters at a joint press conference given with Martin Schulz, the European parliament president, the Cypriot leader ruled out terror as a motive. Suddenly the hijacking appeared to have a motive, one that took officials by surprise. Poking his head through the plane’s door the bespectacled hijacker, thought to be in his fifties, threw a four-page letter written in Arabic on to the tarmac and asked that it be delivered to his former wife, a Cypriot woman living in the village of Oroklini. With the airport under a state of emergency, the Cypriot president, Nikos Anastasiades, called his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, for urgent talks.īut then came a more unusual demand. Very soon, the lines between Nicosia and Cairo began to crackle. Mustafa wanted the heavy police presence around the plane to be removed. The plane had been guided to the airport’s perimeter, its white and blue livery clearly visible through Larnaca’s ringed barbed-wire topped fence, in what was standard procedure for an aircraft believed to be under attack. Cyprus hijacker Seif Eldin Mustafa with a man believed to be Ben Innes.
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