The narrowly averted disaster aboard Flydubai flight FZ1073 has sparked concerns that the Iranian regime may be looking to a new tactic to inflict terror around the world.
Former Israel Defense Forces colonel and intelligence officer Miri Eisin — who now heads Reichman University’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism and once served as a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — warned that a radicalized pilot could be a harbinger of things to come. Using a pilot for such a scheme, Eisin noted, guaranteed the attacker access to the cockpit — access that hijackers in the past have had to take by force.
“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,” Eisin told The New York 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.”
Eisin also said that, although the official investigation is still ongoing, she had believed from the beginning that it was possible Iran was behind the Flydubai attempt.
“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. “Just because someone’s a pilot doesn’t mean they can’t be radicalized, people from all walks of life could be radicalized. [Former Syrian dictator] Bashar al-Assad was a doctor, Josef Mengele was a doctor … And if you kill Israelis, the whole world applauds you.”
President Donald Trump has also suggested that Iran could be responsible for the near miss, but did not give details.
Using trained and radicalized pilots to carry out 9/11-style attacks speaks to a long-term terror strategy — one that was not missed by Oded Ailam, a former deputy head of global operations for Mossad.
“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.
He went on to note that it was far more likely to see “lone wolf” style attacks from pilots who were radicalized by the people around them.
“He’s influenced by jihadists, by extremists in mosques, he’s influenced by prominent Iranians calling for death to Israel,” he said, “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.”
Ailam suggested a technological solution — something that would allow crew members to access the cockpit in the event of a similar attack — might be the best way to prevent future instances.
An Israeli television report found that pilots from Iran, Syria, and Iraq, among other enemy states, have flown foreign airliners into and out of Israel in recent years. Those pilots, according to the report, hold dual citizenship — likely carrying a second passport from a country that would not raise red flags.
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