President Donald Trump told reporters Thursday he believes that Iran could be responsible for the attack aboard a commercial jet that was headed to Israel on Wednesday, but provided no details to support his conclusion.
“I would say the answer, based on what I’m hearing, is yes, but we’re working on it right now,” Trump said after he was asked if Iran was involved.
The comments come after a perilous FlyDubai flight in which a copilot stabbed a captain and allegedly attempted to crash the jetliner over Saudi Arabia as it headed to Israel. In a remarkable series of events, crew and passengers managed to subdue the attacker and safely land the plane after it plummeted from 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet in around a minute.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attacker is an Omani national and is currently being interrogated in Saudi Arabia. The plane’s captain, Smit Machchhar, is recovering at a hospital in Abu Dhabi, the Indian government said Thursday.
“Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker — preventing a catastrophic midair disaster,” Netanyahu said of Machchhar on X. “He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals.”
Tzvika Manes, a passenger in the front row, told The New York Times he was with his wife and daughter when the aircraft began to plummet. Manes said his daughter cried out, “Dad, we don’t want to die.”
That’s when Manes said he took action.
“That was the trigger that made me run inside [the cockpit],” Manes told the Times.
Manes, along with another passenger and an off-duty pilot, entered the cockpit after the wounded captain unlocked it. They subdued the attacker, and crew members who were pilots in training safely landed the plane without a rudder, which had been torn off in the violent descent.
While details on a motive for the attempted hijacking remain unclear, Netanyahu said Wednesday that the attacker “underwent Islamist radical indoctrination.”
Trump ― who started a war with Iran in February without the approval of Congress ― meanwhile seems to be using the attack as a way to legitimize new strikes on Iran.
“Oh, they’ll be hit, very hard, don’t worry,” Trump said after a reporter asked if Tehran would be targeted in response to the incident.
“You just ask them,” Trump said of the Iranian government. “They know what happened. They’ll be hit very hard.”