EgyptAir plane makes emergency landing after bomb hoax

CAIRO // An EgyptAir passenger plane, en route from Cairo to Beijing, was forced to make an emergency landing in Uzbekistan on Wednesday after receiving what two Egyptian aviation sources said was a false bomb threat.

There was no statement from EgyptAir or official confirmation that the threat was a hoax but according to two Egyptian aviation officials, an anonymous caller telephoned security agents at the Cairo airport to say a bomb was on board the flight. The agents immediately contacted the aircraft and ordered it to land at the nearest airport. The plane landed in Urgench, in western Uzbekistan, 840km from the capital, Tashkent. The aircraft was then searched, but no explosives were found, they said.

All 118 passengers and 17 crew members on board the Airbus A-330-220 plane were safely evacuated, Uzbek state carrier Uzbekistan Airways said.

“The plane is preparing to resume its journey. It was a hoax, thank God,” said one of the officials.

The incident came nearly three weeks after an EgyptAir flight crashed in the Mediterranean Sea as it was approaching the Egyptian coast while en route to Cairo from Paris.

All 66 people on board were killed and the search for the plane’s flight and data recorders — the so called black boxes — is still underway. Egyptian officials say the downing of the Paris-Cairo plane was most probably an act of terror.

Last October, a Russian airliner crashed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula shortly after taking off from the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 224 people on board. A local affiliate of the extremist group ISIL claimed responsibility for downing the aircraft just hours after the crash. EgyptAir has received a number of bomb threats since then, all of which have turned out to be hoaxes.

* Associated Press