THE FLYDUBAI ATTACKER’S MOTIVE WAS EVEN DARKER THAN WE THOUGHT:
Hammami reportedly told investigators that after killing the captain, he had intended to continue towards Israel as though making a normal landing approach, then divert at the last possible moment and crash into Ben Gurion airport. He also considered high-rise buildings in Tel Aviv. His calculation was straightforward and chilling: get close enough before revealing his intention that Israeli fighter aircraft would have no time to intervene.
That explains why Hammami did not attack at the beginning of the flight. He struck when the aircraft was already over Jordan, much closer to Israel, when the distance between an apparently routine approach and catastrophe had narrowed dramatically.
Ben Gurion would have been a target with consequences far beyond the immediate massive death toll. A passenger aircraft driven into a crowded terminal during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot could have killed people in the air and on the ground on a scale Israel has rarely experienced. The flight was due to arrive at around 9:30 a.m., during one of the busiest travel periods of the year. Tens of thousands of people could have been passing through the airport complex.
Then there is the wider purpose. Ben Gurion is Israel’s principal physical connection with the world. It carries Israelis, tourists, diplomats, businesspeople, foreign workers, families and freight. A successful attack would have hit far more than a building. Airlines would have reconsidered flying to Israel. Insurers would have reassessed risk. Tourism, already badly damaged after years of war, could have collapsed further. The practical and psychological isolation of the country would have deepened immediately.
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The details are telling. Hammami prayed, then began his attack. This attack is a definite part of a pattern in which Islamist extremists have fused religious conviction with the deliberate murder of civilians. The ideology has a name. Its adherents have repeatedly told us what they believe, whom they consider enemies and what forms of violence they consider permissible.
Machchar, meanwhile, had no luxury of ideology or analysis. He understood that if he could not open the cockpit door, everybody would die. Badly injured, with his memory fragmented and his vision blurred, he found what he described as ‘one last fight’. The crew outside had been trying to gain access using the cockpit code (though the Israelis on board have said in interviews they did not know whether to trust the crew and were later assigned to shadow their every move until landing), while Hammami prevented the door from opening. Machchar forced himself towards the manual mechanism, reached the knob and twisted it. The door opened.
People outside were ready. That act may have saved nearly 180 people on the aircraft. If Hammami’s reported confession is accurate, it may also have saved hundreds or thousands more at Ben Gurion. And even before the full facts were known, another ugliness appeared.
According to Manes and Schlichter, some crew members then demanded that the passengers release him. Manes said crew members told them, “You are not God, you are not going to kill him.”
“We didn’t want to kill him, we just wanted him not to kill us,” Manes said.
Schlichter said the passengers even provided the wounded suspect with oxygen because they wanted him alive to be investigated.
The passengers nevertheless became suspicious enough of the crew that they ordered flight attendants away from the cockpit. “We told them, ‘Now the policy is we’re in charge and you do what we say,’” Manes said. “We didn’t know what to think; we were in a suspicious mode for every steward.”
The pilot himself has quite a trail of social media posts: ‘Stomp on Her Head:’ Flydubai Hijacker Shows What Islam Really Thinks of Women.
