Nairobi: Kenyan authorities are interrogating several suspects who were on an Air France flight from Mauritius to Paris that was forced to land early on Sunday in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa after a device suspected to be a bomb was found in a lavatory.
A few passengers are being questioned, said Kenya's Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery, speaking at a press conference at the Mombasa airport. Bomb experts are inspecting the device to see if it was an explosive, he said.
The Boeing 777 Air France flight 463 was heading to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris when the pilots requested an emergency landing at the Moi International Airport at 12:37 a.m., police spokesman Charles Owino said.
"It requested an emergency landing when a device suspected to be an explosive was discovered in the lavatory," Owino said.
The plane was carrying 459 passengers and 14 crew members on board and had left Mauritius at 9 p.m., Owino said
All passengers were safely evacuated and the device was taken out, said Owino.
"The object, believed to be an explosive device has successfully been retrieved from the aircraft," said Kenya Airports Authority in a post on Twitter, adding that scheduled flights to Mombasa were disrupted during the interval but that normal operations have resumed.
A passenger who spoke to journalists after leaving the plane in Mombasa described the emergency landing.
"The plane just went down slowly, slowly, slowly, so we just realized probably something was wrong," said Benoit Lucchini of Paris.
"The personnel of Air France was just great, they were just wonderful. So they keep everybody calm. We did not know what was happening," said Lucchini. "So we secured the seat belt to land in Mombasa because we thought it was a technical problem but actually it was not a technical problem. It was something in the toilet. Something wrong in the toilet, it could be a bomb.”
