UAE: Flydubai hijacker radicalized in Australia, planned Tel Aviv airport attack

On September 30th, a Flydubai aircraft carrying more than 170 passengers and crew departed Dubai bound for Tel Aviv. Somewhere over the Arabian Peninsula, the Omani co-pilot moved to seize control of the plane. He had an emergency crash axe. He wounded the captain in the cockpit. But passengers and crew fought back, overpowered him, and the aircraft landed safely in Saudi Arabia.

Now, as investigators piece together what happened, UAE officials are describing a radicalization that began years earlier, in a place far from the Middle East: Australia. The 29-year-old co-pilot, widely identified as Hamam al-Hammami, studied engineering at RMIT Melbourne between 2015 and 2017. According to the UAE's attorney-general, Hamad Saif al-Shamsi, it was during those years that al-Hammami began what officials describe as a "drift towards extremism and terrorism." He consumed extremist literature and followed online content that glorified terrorist organizations and suicide attacks. He was inspired, interrogators say, by al-Qaeda's September 11th attacks in the United States.

The trajectory is stark when laid against al-Hammami's own words. Years later, on social media, he would describe his time studying abroad in Australia, Britain, and New Zealand as "the golden years of my religious commitment." What began as a student's intellectual journey had become something else entirely. According to officials, he prepared himself psychologically and physically for what he allegedly planned: a suicide attack. He intensified his exposure to material promoting terrorism. He trained in boxing under a private coach. He told interrogators he acted alone, though investigations continue to verify that claim.

What makes the case particularly troubling is that the warning signs were visible before the hijacking attempt. Oman Air, the national carrier of his home country, had barred al-Hammami from flying. The airline removed him from pilot duties and reassigned him to an administrative role specifically because of concerns about his extremist views. Yet when he applied to Flydubai, the UAE-based carrier hired him. The company conducted standard security checks, but those checks did not examine his background for signs of radicalization. No one flagged what Oman Air already knew.

There is another layer to the security failure. Israeli aviation regulations explicitly prohibit pilots who are citizens of countries without formal diplomatic relations with Israel from operating flights to the country. Oman has no such relations with Israel. By those rules, al-Hammami should never have been cleared to fly the Dubai-Tel Aviv route. Yet he was.

The Indian co-pilot, Capt Smit Machchhar, has been called a hero. While being violently attacked with an axe, he managed to unlock the cockpit door, allowing passengers to enter and regain control of the aircraft. His actions likely prevented the attack al-Hammami had allegedly planned: crashing the plane into Tel Aviv's airport.

Australian authorities have now opened their own investigation. The Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team, composed of the Australian Federal Police, Victoria Police, and the country's security agency ASIO, is examining al-Hammami's links to Australia. RMIT confirmed he had studied there but left before completing his degree. The question now is not just what happened on that flight, but how a person flagged by one airline for extremist concerns was able to move seamlessly into employment at another, with access to an aircraft full of civilians and a direct route to a target he allegedly intended to strike.