A strange incident was reported a few days ago by the Italian and French media and caused a great stir: it involved an emergency landing of a plane at Rome airport, after a piece of paper containing a two-word sentence was was found in the possession of an Egyptian passenger.
On the evening of Tuesday 7 November, at half past five sharp, a flight coming from the French capital Paris and bound for the Egyptian capital Cairo was forced to make an emergency landing at Rome airport to drop off an Egyptian passenger.
According to French media reports, the plane’s crew suspected a delirious Egyptian passenger with strange and incomprehensible behavior, who was asking for medicine and writing a two-word sentence on the medicine sheet that suggested his intention to commit suicide. . This prompted the crew to make an immediate decision to head to the nearest airport, Rome, to drop off the passenger and investigate him.
The crew decided to land while the plane was flying over the island of Brac in Croatia, where it decided to head to Fumicino airport in the Italian capital, Rome.
According to videos obtained by Al Arabiya.net, the Egyptian passenger was talking to the crew and suddenly his voice raised and he started shouting, asking them to leave him and kept repeating: “What’s the problem? I’m Egyptian and I need help.”
At Rome airport, according to what was reported by the Italian media, snipers had been deployed on the landing strip for fear that the passenger might carry out a terrorist act. Immediately after landing, the authorities interrogated him and asked him what the secret of the phrase “I love God” was. ”What he wrote and his intention to carry out a terrorist act or not.
Italian authorities said the plane’s pilot had asked to land without giving any reason, adding that the airline had merely stated that the flight’s destination had been changed to Rome for safety reasons after an abnormal behavior of one of the passengers, and that this was followed by respecting the established procedures and requesting the intervention of the police without providing any information.
For their part, the Italian authorities confirmed that the snipers present deployed naturally and not because of this issue, adding that the Egyptian passenger was released without any judicial measures being taken against him.
Al Arabiya.net found the identity of the Egyptian passenger and looked for the other side of the story: it turned out that the passenger was a 23-year-old young man named Mahmoud Ahmed Abdel Sattar Barham from Asfour village in the city. from Belqas, Dakahlia Governorate in the north of the country, he went to Italy to work there and then also headed to France for work and residence.
According to advisor Ahmed Ismail El-Zanati, member of the Arab-European Center for Human Rights, responsible for legal follow-up to the incident with the Italian and French authorities and the Egyptian embassy in Rome, told Al-Arabiya.net , the young man has been suffering from psychological and nervous disorders for more than a year after having suffered a judicial fraud and the loss of his money in… Italy, and then went to work in France, but his psychological state worsened, adding that his family convinced him during the last phone call to return to Egypt for treatment and booked travel tickets for him.
Councilor Ahmed El-Zanati
He continued by saying that on Tuesday 7 November the young man boarded the plane from Orly airport in France and, while in flight, engaged in unbalanced behavior which aroused suspicion on him, prompting the crew to take the decision to land. the plane to Fumicino airport in Italy, and was arrested there by Italian authorities. He recalls that Dr Ahmed Ghazi, director of the centre, contacted the Italian authorities and the Egyptian embassy in Rome and provided evidence of the young man’s need for treatment, who was therefore released, but was repatriated to France, which they were detained again at the Charles de Gaulle airport police station.
He confirmed that he had submitted a request to the French authorities for the rapid release of the young man, “especially because he suffers from serious ailments and has no political, religious or extremist affiliations”, asking that he be brought back to Egypt to provide him with medical treatment.