The pilot who was stabbed by his “terrorist” co-pilot as he tried to take control of a flydubai flight bound for Israel has been identified as Indian national Smit Machchhar.
Page A4From§Eachthe noon edition — 30 September 2026
Israel brands cockpit suspect a jihadist terrorist before Saudi Arabia, which is holding them, says a word.
As it ran on the front
The facts here are not complicated. Israeli officials called it what it was: an attempted jihadist terror attack, and they were right to say so fast, because the alternative was letting a hijacking-in-progress sit unlabeled while people who did nothing wrong got saved by strangers with nothing but their hands and their nerve. This is what leadership sounds like. This is Netanyahu doing his job — hailing the heroes on camera, telling the public what happened, telling them who the villain was, telling them —
telling them, actually, that Saudi authorities were still interrogating both pilots. That's in his own address. The people running the interrogation are the ones who haven't said anything public yet about why the copilot did what they did. Netanyahu named a motive. The investigation that would establish a motive was, by his own account, still underway, in a country he does not run.…
…(cont) Israel's defense minister took it further and called it flatly "a jihadist terrorist attack attempt" — not alleged, not under investigation, just branded, the way you'd brand a product line, and there's nothing wrong with confidence when the confidence is earned. The suspect is under arrest. They have not been convicted of anything. They have not, as far as the wire record shows, even been formally charged with what the defense minister already convicted them of in a sentence, in a different country, before the country holding them said a—
before Saudi Arabia said anything. That's the part of the timeline that matters and the part that gets skipped: the suspect is in Saudi custody, the plane diverted to a Saudi airport, and the investigators who actually control the file are the only ones who haven't spoken. Everyone else has.
None of that erases what happened in the cockpit. The pilot, an Indian national named Smit Machchhar, is credited in at least one outlet's account as the pilot who fought for control of the aircraft, and whatever else is contested, a knife went into someone and passengers moved to stop worse. That part holds. What doesn't hold is the order of operations: the label came first, attached by people an ocean away from the interrogation room, and the facts that would actually support or undercut that label are still sitting with the government that hasn't said a word.
“They call it terror before the country holding the guy even finishes the interrogation, and that's not an update, that's a verdict doing an investigation's job for it. You get branded a jihadist by a government that isn't running your case, and the correction, if it ever comes, never travels as far as the accusation did. This is how a man nobody's charged with anything ends up already convicted in every headline that matters.”
“Look, Netanyahu called it fast because that's what leadership looks like, you don't sit on your hands while heroes are still being hailed — I mean, he also said Saudi's still interrogating both guys, so maybe nobody actually knows the why of it yet. The defense minister's not wrong to call it jihadist terrorism outright, it's obviously — actually it's still under investigation in a country that hasn't said one word publicly, so I'm not sure why I'm defending the order we said things in.”
The receipts
The copilot who stabbed the pilot of a flydubai plane headed for Tel Aviv has been arrested for attempting what Israel's defense minister has branded “a jihadist terrorist attack attempt.”
A FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was diverted to Saudi Arabia Wednesday morning after an incident took place between the pilots in the cockpit.
Israeli officials say passengers helped thwart an "attempted jihadist terror attack" by a FlyDubai pilot who allegedly stabbed his fellow cockpit crewmember, intent on crashing the plane.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed the “heroes” who stormed the cockpit to prevent the hijacking of a Flydubai flight in his first address since the incident and revealed that Saudi authorities were interrogating the pilots. In his video address, Netanyahu cleared up the flurry of details that had emerged about the…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.