KENYAN and French police are holding five suspects and analysing a suspected bomb removed from an Air France plane at the Moi International Airport in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
The suspects boarded the plane in Mauritius and were headed to Paris, France.
Senior Anti-Terrorism Police Unit officers said the suspicious device was mounted in the airplane’s lavatory, with a timer.
An ATPU officer told the Star that bomb experts dismantled the device and handed it to forensic experts for further analysis.
The timer was on, but the intended moment of the attack was not immediately established by the Kenyan security authorities.
The disposal operation, which started around midnight, involved five senior bomb experts drawn from the Kenya Navy and the ATPU.
Both the aircraft and airport were safely evacuated while the device was removed from the plane.
Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery said Kenyan authorities received a distress call from Air France and evacuated over 473 passengers from the Boeing 777 aircraft.
“The Air France plane was en-route to Paris from Mauritius and made an emergency landing in Mombasa after a suspicious device was found in the lavatory. We are still analyzing the device,” said Nkaissery.
“We are in touch with Mauritius to know how security screening of passengers was done,” Nkaissery said. “A few passengers are being interrogated,” he added.
The plane was carrying 459 passengers and 14 crewmembers and had left Mauritius at 01:00 GMT.
It had been due to fly directly to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.
One of those on board, Benoit Lucchini, said passengers were calm and were told by the crew that the plane was being diverted because of a technical problem.
“The plane just went down, slowly, slowly, slowly, so we just realised probably something was wrong,” he said.
“But the personnel of Air France were just great, just wonderful. So they keep everybody calm and really quiet.”
Senior detectives from France were yesterday dispatched from Nairobi to assist in the complex investigation.
This comes in the wake of last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, in which 130 died and for which the terrorist group Islamic State of Iran and Syria claimed responsibility.
ISIS also claimed responsibility for Metrojet Flight 9268, operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia, which disintegrated above northern Sinai on October 31, 2015, at 06:13 local time.
France began airstrikes in Syria in September. On Friday, the French government lifted the travel ban it had imposed on Mombasa and Malindi.