Air France bomb scare was false alarm, airline boss says

Air France CEO Frederic Gagey has said that the suspicious device that was found on the plane which was heading to France from Mauritius was a false alarm.

The bomb scare forced the Boeing 777 to land at the Moi International Airport in Mombasa a few minutes past midnight on Sunday where all the 459 passengers and 14 crew members were safely evacuated.

The plane had left Port Louis in Mauritius at 8pm local time on Saturday evening and was scheduled to arrive at Charles de Gaulle in Paris, France at 7:50am Sunday morning.

Addressing the press on Sunday, Gagey said the decision to make an emergency landing in Mombasa was reached because it was the closet airport able to handle a Boeing 777 aircraft.

“All the information available to us at the moment indicates that the object was not capable of creating an explosion or damaging a plane, bit was rather a mixture of cardboard, sheets of paper and a timer. It was a false alarm,” he said.

Gagey congratulated the crew for their swift reaction to land the plane in Mombasa saying safety checks was carried out in the toilets denying that there were any security failures on their part.

Kenya’s Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery had earlier said that several passengers were being questioned in connection to the incident adding that local bomb experts were holding a joint investigation with their counterparts from Mauritius and France.

The passengers who had been booked at various hotels in Mombasa left for France on Sunday evening aboard another plane sent from France.