Saudi Arabia Arrests Suspect After Flydubai Cockpit Stabbing on Tel Aviv Flight

Captain Smit Machchhar lay wounded on the cockpit floor of Flydubai Flight FZ1073. The Boeing 737 MAX 8 had been bound from Dubai to Tel Aviv for about two hours when the co-pilot allegedly stabbed him.

“I was lying on the floor injured, but I told myself to go for one last push to open the door from inside,” Machchhar said later. He forced the cockpit door open.

Aviatar Alevi first took it for a mechanical failure. Then he heard the screaming. “At the start, I thought it was a plane malfunction, but then I started hearing screaming about the stabbings,” he said. “We were so scared. We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Motti Cohen Or heard a woman shout that someone was stabbing someone in the cockpit as the jet dived toward the ground. Passengers and crew forced their way forward onto the flight deck. Yaniv Hayun was among them. “I grabbed the attacker, and choked him, pulled him out first,” Hayun said. “I started pulling the controls.” The work, he said, sat “between fear and a sense of a do-or-die situation.” “We had to win. We had to pull through and come out on top.” “Thank God, we pulled it off. We really put our heads together and worked as a team.” Asaf Rajuan was among the passengers who intervened in the scramble forward.

The plane dropped from about 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet in about a minute.

A second set of Flydubai pilots already aboard regained control and flew the aircraft out of the dive. They brought Flight FZ1073 down at Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. The emergency landing was recorded at 9:45 a.m. local time. The jet carried 174 passengers and eight crew. Everyone aboard had survived.

Saudi authorities, working with a security team from the United Arab Emirates, opened a preliminary investigation. Their early finding was that the co-pilot had assaulted the captain. Both men were injured and hospitalized in Tabuk. The suspect was held.

Benjamin Netanyahu praised Machchhar and said the captain’s actions had helped save the 174 passengers. After the attacker was restrained, Netanyahu said, the man called for authorities to kill him, which Netanyahu characterized as evidence of intent to die in the act. He called the episode a serious security incident.

The man was Hamam Alhamami, a 29-year-old Omani national. Oman Air had grounded him in 2024 after finding he had been visiting radical Islamic websites and after he was identified, while still a co-pilot trainee, as a security risk found with extremist material. He was kept on in an administrative role. He was believed to have spent time in Syria and to have been influenced there by extremist ideas. Oman barred him from flying over those radical ideological views. He left for the United Arab Emirates.