A man who apparently hijacked a domestic EgyptAir flight in part to try and contact his ex-wife in Cyprus has surrendered without harming any of the plane’s 55 passengers or its crew, reports say. The man, Seif Eldin Mustafa, demanded that EgyptAir Flight MS181 from Alexandria to Cairo be diverted to Cyprus after threatening to detonate an explosive belt—which may or may not have been real, and which you can see in this picture:
(Update, 9:55 a.m.: It was apparently not real.)
Here’s where Cyprus is in relation to Egypt:
Screenshot/Google Maps
The hijacker spent the first three hours of the standoff demanding to speak to his Cypriot ex-wife, a high-level source close to the operation told NBC News.
Other demands were made as well, though they were not necessarily coherent:
“He asked for asylum, he wanted to talk with someone from the European Union … It seems that he was an unstable personality,” the source explained, requesting anonymity due to the fluid nature of the investigation.
The Guardian reports that Mustafa’s ex-wife was apparently brought to the airport in the city of Larnaca where the flight landed and that he “is believed to have thrown a letter to her from the plane.”
