Make New York Post a Preferred Source The hijacking of the Dubai airliner carrying Israeli passengers might be the beginning of a horrifying new terrorist tactic of recruiting and radicalizing real pilots to do 9/11-style attacks, a former IDF colonel and veteran intelligence officer warns.
“An individual doesn’t get the idea on his own to crash a plane full of people including himself. Somebody told him that if you do that you get your 72 virgins,” Miri Eisin, now an Israeli government spokesman, told The Post.
“If you think back to past plane hijackings, including 9/11, the hijacker was never the pilot of the plane. . . . This could be a new kind of suicide bomber,” she said.
Eisin, who served in the Israel Defense Forces as an intelligence officer for over 20 years, said she immediately suspected Iran’s hand in the near-tragic FlyDubai hijacking — though she was careful to stress she has no direct evidence and that the investigation is ongoing.
She said that the Omani pilot who stabbed his Indian co-pilot and attempted to crash the plane full of 174 passengers before he was overpowered by heroic Israeli passengers could have been radicalized by the Islamic Republic or its terrorist proxies.
President Trump has also suggested Iran might have been involved, but did not elaborate.
The pilot has been identified by The Wall Street Journal as an Omani national named Hamam al-Hammami. He had previously been banned from flying by Oman due to suspicions he had become radicalized, according to the publication.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the attacker had been subject to “Islamic radicalization.”
“This to me is very much something that could have come from Hezbollah or the IRGC Quds Force, this is the kind of things that they think of,” she said.
Eisin said that Iran, if responsible for the attack, may be trying to unleash a new kind of suicide bomber by infiltrating airlines with radicalized pilots who could launch an attack at any time.
Eisin said a pilot’s professional training would not make him immune to extremist indoctrination.
“Just because someone’s a pilot doesn’t mean they can’t be radicalized, people from all walks of life could be radicalized. [Syrian dictator] Bashar al-Assad was a doctor, Josef Mengele was a doctor,” she said.
“And if you kill Israelis, the whole world applauds you,” she added.
Oded Ailam, a former deputy head of global operations for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said recruiting a commercial pilot to deliberately crash a plane would require a far more elaborate process than persuading a young suicide bomber to carry out an attack.
“Recruiting and convincing a pilot to do something like that, it’s not the same as telling a 15-year-old to strap on a bomb and walk into a promenade and explode himself. This is a very sophisticated and long operation,” he said.
Ailam, who is now a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, said that it’s likely that Iran was able to radicalize the pilot passively without formally recruiting him via its vast array of anti-Israel propaganda online and in other venues.
“The lone wolf is influenced by the pack of wolves around him, he’s influenced by jihadists, by extremists in mosques, he’s influenced by prominent Iranians calling for death to Israel,” he said.
Ailam said that the prospect of lone wolf extremists could pose an even more dangerous threat to air travel than organized terror cells that could be identified and disrupted.
“Terror combined with mental disturbances in the pilot, when you combine it together the outcome is horrific. There are a lot of people who are being radicalized who are airline pilots,” he said.
Ailam said the flydubai attack will likely lead governments to rethink their post-9/11 security measures, and he predicts airlines will soon have to install technology that lets crew access the cockpit in the case of a copycat attack.
“It’s impossible to screen every pilot, the answer will have to be technological,” he said.
