26-year-old Ben Innes from Leeds, England, kick-started his holiday to Egypt by posing for a photo with a man who had hijacked the plane he was flying on, with his broad grin now plastered on the front pages of newspapers across the UK. The photo presents a myriad of question, chief among them being the simple “why?” But now Innes has explained the reasoning behind the photo, and it somehow makes less sense than any conclusion we’d made in our own heads.
The photo, which sees Innes standing next to flight MS181 hijacker Seif El Din Mustafa, still clad in his “bomb belt” (it later transpired that the “bombs” were actually iPhone cases), was apparently taken at Innes’ request. Speaking to The Sun, the health and safety auditor said: “I’m not sure why I did it, I just threw caution to the wind while trying to stay cheerful in the face of adversity.”
He continued: “I figured if his bomb was real I’d nothing lose anyway, so took a chance to get a closer look at it. I got one of the cabin crew to translate for me and asked him if I could do a selfie with him.
“He just shrugged OK so I stood by him and smiled for the camera while a stewardess did the snap. It has to be the best selfie ever.”
Innes added that he asked for the photograph after Mustafa had let “virtually all” the other passengers leave the plane after it performed an emergency stop at Larnaca, with just himself and one other British passenger being kept behind. After posing for the photograph and getting a further glimpse of the belt, Innes came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t real. “It was hard to be sure, but I reckoned it was more likely to be fake after I got a close look at it,” Innes said, adding: “So I decided to go back to my seat and plot my next move.”
His next move, apparently, was sending his friend a message on WhatsApp discussing the encounter:
That’s certainly one way to deal with a potential terrorist threat.
Thankfully, everyone safely exited the plane without injury, with Mustafa being arrested by police shortly afterwards.
