The axe-wielding co-pilot who attacked the captain of a flydubai flight to Tel Aviv last month intended to seize control of the airplane and fly it into the passenger terminal at Israel’s main international airport, authorities in the United Arab Emirates said Friday (October 9, 2026).

The suspect, an Omani national, did so “with the intention of causing the greatest possible number of human casualties,” the UAE’s top prosecutor said in a statement carried by the state news agency WAM. Most of the 174 passengers on the flight were from Israel.

The statement said the co-pilot “drew inspiration” from the Sept 11, 2001 attacks in the United States and used two previous flights from Dubai to Tel Aviv to “familiarise himself with the flight route and the airport”.

It said none of flydubai’s security or professional checks had indicated that the pilot, who was identitifed by The Associated Press as 29-year-old Hamam al-Hammami, harboured extremist views or plans to carry out an attack.

Mr. Hammami “admitted that he had acted alone, without the involvement of others,” the statement said, adding that he “provided a detailed confession outlining his motives and the stages of planning and execution” in the presence of his lawyer.

It also suggested he was radicalised at a mosque in Australia while attending the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2017.

The update from the public prosecutor Friday (October 9, 2026) was the most comprehensive since the UAE took over the investigation shortly after the incident on Sept 30. flydubai is a government-owned airline.

The crisis unfolded suddenly in the skies above Jordan and Saudi Arabia, when Mr. Hammami attacked the Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, with a crash axe in the cockpit. Bloodied and beaten, Mr. Machchhar managed to open the cockpit door, alerting passengers and crew to the assault.

Passengers detained Hammami and helped steady the aircraft, which had plunged roughly 14,000 to 16,000 feet in less than a minute. Two reserve pilots then guided the plane to an emergency landing at Tabuk airport in Saudi Arabia.

Israel will begin repatriation flights on Friday (October 2, 2026) to bring back passengers stranded in the United Arab Emirates after commercial travel between the two countries was suspended in the wake of the attack on a pilot by his copilot who tried to crash a Tel Aviv-bound flight this week.

The effort to get Israeli passengers home comes as authorities in Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and beyond are grappling with the fallout from the incident on board the flydubai flight Wednesday that has raised questions about the state of aviation security and further unsettled a Middle East already shaken by the ongoing US-Iran war.

Nothing is publicly known about the motive of the copilot who came close to crashing the aircraft, which had departed from Dubai earlier on Wednesday (September 30, 2026), and killing all 182 aboard. A regional investigation is underway.

The UAE has cancelled all flights to Israel, complicating travel for hundreds of passengers who fly between the countries on a typical day.

Israel and the UAE agreed on the repatriation flights, beginning on Friday (October 2, 2026), according to an Israeli official who was not authorised to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. Earlier, the national carrier El Al had said the UAE was holding up the necessary landing permits to allow it to fly into Dubai.

The Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv listed carriers Arkia and Israir with flights scheduled to arrive from Dubai late Friday and early on Saturday (October 3). El Al was expected to fly passengers from Dubai to Israel on Sunday (October 4).

Dubai has been a popular destination for Israelis since Israel and the United Arab Emirates established ties in 2020 as part of the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords to normalise ties between Israel and Arab countries.

Mr. Trump says he’ll hit Iran very hard if it had a hand in the attack