Eleven days after helping overpower the co-pilot accused of trying to crash a flydubai flight bound for Israel, Asaf Rajuan wants two flight attendants investigated. He also wants to hear from the two additional pilots who brought the aircraft down safely in Saudi Arabia.
Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Rajuan said he suspected the attendants had assisted the attacker. He described confrontations with passengers, objections to filming and exchanges between the two men that left him afraid the danger had continued after the co-pilot was restrained.
The September 30 flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv diverted to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, after the co-pilot attacked the captain with an aircraft emergency axe.
His allegations remain unsubstantiated. The UAE’s October 9 account credited a flight attendant with helping subdue the attacker. It said the co-pilot had confessed to acting alone, while making clear that investigators were still checking for accomplices and other connections.
Rajuan wants Israel involved in establishing what happened. In our conversation, he kept returning to the crew’s behavior and the difficulty of knowing whom to trust while the aircraft was still airborne.
He had been returning from Phuket, Thailand, with his wife and their two daughters, approaching their 12th and 14th birthdays. He was seated in 7D when a woman ran down the aisle shouting that someone had a knife. He looked toward his family and saw them thrown into the air.
He thought he was watching his daughters die.
He ran toward the front. The captain’s resistance had already weakened the attacker, Rajuan said, making it easier for passengers to overpower him. He suffered a small head wound and emerged covered in blood, much of which, he said, was not his own.
The suspicions about the attendants
Rajuan made his most specific accusation in an interview with N12’s Ulpan Shishi, broadcast Friday. He alleged that one attendant began loosening the attacker’s restraints after passengers had subdued him. Several passengers noticed and challenged the man, he said.
He also described an attendant approaching the wounded captain with a tablet while the captain was receiving medical treatment. Rajuan said passengers intervened because they could not understand why someone would try to give him a pill in that condition.
“I have no proof,” he told N12 when asked whether the attendants had cooperated with the attacker.
In our interview, Rajuan described grabbing, pulling at clothing, and repeated confrontations with the attendants. One asked whether he was a police officer. He remembered their physical strength and their determination to stop passengers filming. He feared someone would produce another weapon.
There was uncertainty even about where the aircraft was heading. Passengers checked GPS locations and offered competing answers: Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia. Rajuan wondered whether they were still being hijacked.
“I became paranoid,” he said.
He acknowledged that he had begun suspecting everyone. Yet he wanted investigators to examine the specific encounters he and other passengers remembered, including the attendants’ interactions with those guarding the attacker. He described an atmosphere of mutual fear and pressure that persisted after the immediate struggle had ended.
The pilots who took over
Rajuan also wanted to know what had become of the two additional pilots. He said he had looked for their public accounts and had not found them. On N12, he recalled last seeing the pilot who saved the aircraft as he disembarked.
Their presence aboard Flight FZ1073 has an explanation we reported on September 30.
There were four pilots: the captain who was attacked, his co-pilot, and a second flydubai cockpit crew traveling in the passenger cabin. The additional captain and co-pilot were available to operate the return flight from Israel.
A person familiar with the arrangement told the Post that possible regional diversions could add hours to the flight and leave the operating crew beyond its permitted working hours. The additional pilots had been assigned as a staffing precaution, without advance warning of an attack.
When I interviewed Tal, an Israeli businessman aboard the flight, at Tel Aviv’s Carlton hotel on October 1, he described having to get those men forward while other passengers fought the attacker.
“I had to shake them to get them to move to the front and take control of the plane,” he said.
Tal recalled an interval when the cockpit was empty. One pilot eventually took control; the other, he said, took longer to recover from the shock. We have not independently established the duration of that interval or the precise sequence inside the cockpit.
The UAE’s account described the relief captain noticing unusual movements of the cockpit door, entering with an access code and helping passengers and a flight attendant overpower the attacker. He and his co-pilot then restored control and landed in Tabuk.
It did not address Tal’s account of their initial hesitation or the empty cockpit.
The relief pilots have spoken to investigators: prosecutors said they had taken statements from both men. The statement did not name them.
Our interviews have reconstructed the emergency from the passenger cabin: people fighting at the front, an injured captain being treated, two other pilots being urged toward the controls. Rajuan wants the men who eventually flew the aircraft to give their own account, including what they saw of the attendants’ conduct.
“I hope that Israel will investigate it as it should be,” he said. “Because it’s something that needs answers.”
