Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said one of the pilots may have been attempting to crash the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. The plane landed in Saudi Arabia and all passengers were safe.
Page A2From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 September 2026
Netanyahu called it terrorism and posed for photos before the actual hero had a name.
As it ran on the front
The story so far needs only a brief walk before the new part, because the order is the whole story. Israeli officials called the mid-air stabbing aboard a FlyDubai flight a jihadist terror attack, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a pilot may have tried to crash the plane. The plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia, the New York Times reported — before Saudi investigators, on whose soil that plane sat, had said a word in public. The label traveled faster than the facts.
Then came the photo. A passenger walked off the rescue flight and into a meeting with Netanyahu, still covered in blood, the New York Post reported. It is a fine photo, professionally composed, and it ran before anyone outside India knew the name of the man who had actually kept the plane from going down.…
…(cont) Netanyahu's political rivals noticed the gap and said so, the Washington Examiner reported: he was claiming credit for stopping a threat he had not, personally, stopped. That is a fair description of the order of events, and the order is not in dispute — wait, it is in dispute, politically. Not factually. The dates line up the way they line up.
Now, finally, the name arrives. The pilot who was stabbed and who unlocked the cockpit door himself, letting passengers storm in, is Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, the Washington Examiner confirmed. He was first identified in Indian media. The confirmation from Israel came after that — from Netanyahu himself, and separately from the Indian Embassy. Not from Israeli investigators first. Not from the airline first.
The defense of the timeline is simple: these things take time, identities must be verified, embassies move at the speed embassies move — the terror label needed none of that, I should say, it moved the same day. That defense holds up fine until you notice what actually moved fastest: the terror label, the photo, the credit. Those needed no verification at all. They needed a camera.
Machchhar bled for that plane. He unlocked the door himself. The name that took days to reach official confirmation belongs to the man who did the thing the photo op was standing in for.
“This is the racket: the terror label and the photo op go out same-day, free of charge, while the name of the guy who actually got stabbed and still unlocked that door has to wait for India to say it first. That's not an intelligence delay, that's a press release outrunning a passport. Notice who gets the camera and who gets the confirmation days later — it's never the guy who did the bleeding.”
“Look, you don't want a government putting out a name before it's verified — that's just responsible process, that's why Netanyahu waited to confirm Machchhar until Indian media had already— wait, they'd already reported it, so he wasn't first, he was confirming. So what I'm actually defending is the speed of the terror label, not the speed of the naming. Did I say that? That's not what I meant to defend.”
Earlier in this story
- Israel names hijacking suspect a terrorist before his captors speak, hero before the blood dries, credit before the log exists By Chip · the matinee edition, 30 September 2026
- Israel brands cockpit suspect a jihadist terrorist before Saudi Arabia, which is holding them, says a word. By Chip · the noon edition, 30 September 2026
The receipts
The pilot who unlocked the cockpit door of a hijacked Flydubai flight after getting stabbed to allow passengers to storm the cockpit was identified by officials as Indian national Smit Machchhar. Machchhar was first identified in Indian media, which was followed by a confirmation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the…
Israeli officials say passengers helped thwart an "attempted jihadist terror attack" by a FlyDubai pilot who allegedly stabbed his fellow cockpit crew member, intent on crashing the plane.
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.