“The plane started going wild. Two heroes jumped forward toward the pilot and stopped the attacker,” 16-year-old Peleg Itali recalled after surviving Wednesday’s suspected terror attack aboard a Flydubai flight.
Peleg was traveling through Dubai with his parents and sister when, according to Israeli accounts of the incident, one pilot stabbed the other and allegedly tried to crash the aircraft with 174 passengers aboard.
“I was sitting right near the front rows, and suddenly the plane started going wild,” Peleg told ynet. “I heard a woman shouting, ‘He was stabbed, he was stabbed.’ Two heroes jumped forward toward the pilot, and it turns out they managed to stop the attacker who stabbed one of the pilots.”
He described the fear and confusion as passengers struggled to understand what was happening.
“You don’t know what’s going on. Nobody explains to you that there’s an attacker or that someone was actually stabbed,” he said.
“I started talking to God. I told him, ‘I’m sorry for everything I’ve done. Please, heaven.’ That’s what I was thinking, because you see the ground, you feel yourself falling. You feel like you’re just a touch away from God. I almost started writing my eulogy.”
Peleg said the presence of young children made the situation even harder.
“There were families there, mothers with children. One woman was trying to calm two girls, not very old, maybe 4 and 6,” he said. “It’s hard. How do you explain to them that there’s an attacker, that someone attacked the pilot and that there’s a chance we’re going to die? You can’t. It was frightening. Everyone was screaming.”
‘How do you explain to children that we might die?’ Peleg Itali
(Photo: Yariv Katz)
Eight-year-old Omer Shalom, who was traveling with her parents and two sisters, said she was terrified.
“I was really scared because I thought we were going to crash,” she said.
Omer said her mother later told her, after the suspect had been subdued, that the aircraft would land in Saudi Arabia and that they still faced several more hours before reaching home.
Her father said a passenger near the cockpit played a crucial role in alerting others.
“The great miracle was that a woman got up to go to the bathroom near the cockpit, heard screams from inside and shouted to her husband,” he said. “Yaniv Hayun was the hero of the flight who overpowered the attacker.”
He described the aircraft plunging violently.
“From the speed of the fall, the rear wing was damaged. We dived downward. It went on for a long time, with jolts up and down, the plane at unbelievable angles,” he said. “Everything goes through your head, all the things I can’t say again in front of the girls.”
A preliminary investigation has raised the possibility that the co-pilot stabbed the Indian captain with an emergency crash axe kept inside the cockpit and intended for breaking aircraft windows.
Investigators have ruled out an earlier theory that the co-pilot boarded the aircraft carrying an axe, according to the report, because flight crews undergo security screening before boarding.
One possibility under examination is whether the co-pilot was directed by Iran. At this stage, however, there is no evidence supporting that theory.