Air France flight forced to land in Kenya following bomb scare

The Boeing 777 Air France flight 463 was heading to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris when the pilots requested an emergency landing at the Moi International Airport at 12.37am.

Air France flight 463 from Mauritius to Paris was forced to land in Mombasa after a device suspected to be a bomb was found in the lavatory. EPA

NAIROBI // An Air France flight from Mauritius to Paris was forced to land in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa after a device suspected to be a bomb was found in the lavatory, a Kenyan police official said yesterday.

Flight 463, a Boeing 777, was en route to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris when the pilots requested an emergency landing at the Moi International Airport at 12.37am, police spokesman Charles Owino said.

“It requested an emergency landing when a device suspected to be an explosive was discovered in the lavatory,” Mr Owino said.

The plane was carrying 459 passengers and 14 crew members and had left Mauritius at 9pm, Mr Owino said.

The plane was evacuated and the device removed, said Mr Owino.

The suspect device was being examined.

“The object, believed to be an explosive device has successfully been retrieved from the aircraft,” said Kenya Airports Authority in a post on Twitter. Scheduled flights to Mombasa were disrupted during the interval but normal operations had resumed, it added.

“The plane just went down slowly, slowly, slowly, so we just realised probably something was wrong,” said a passenger who identified himself as Benoit Lucchini of Paris.

“The personnel of Air France was just great, they were just wonderful. So they keep everybody calm. We did not know what was happening,” said Mr Luchini. “So we secured the seat belt to land in Mombasa because we thought it was a technical problem but actually it was not a technical problem. It was something in the toilet. Something wrong in the toilet, it could be a bomb.”

* Associated Press