Miri Eisin, a former IDF colonel and veteran intelligence officer, has warned that Iran may be pioneering a terrifying new terror tactic: recruiting and radicalizing commercial airline pilots to carry out 9/11-style suicide attacks.
Eisin, 47, who served more than two decades in Israeli military intelligence and now works as an Israeli government spokesperson, told The Post that the recent FlyDubai hijacking attempt set off immediate alarm bells. The Omani pilot, identified by The Wall Street Journal as Hamam al-Hammami, stabbed his Indian co-pilot and tried to crash a plane carrying 174 passengers before being overpowered by Israeli passengers on board.
“An individual doesn’t get the idea on his own to crash a plane full of people including himself. Somebody told him that if you do that you get your 72 virgins,” Eisin said in her interview with The Post. She was careful to stress she has no direct evidence and that the investigation remains ongoing.
Eisin drew a sharp distinction between this incident and every previous major aircraft hijacking, including the September 11 attacks. “If you think back to past plane hijackings, including 9/11, the hijacker was never the pilot of the plane,” she noted. “This could be a new kind of suicide bomber.”
The pilot had previously been banned from flying by Oman due to suspicions he had become radicalized, according to The Wall Street Journal’s reporting. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also stated publicly that the attacker had been subject to “Islamic radicalization.”
Eisin pointed directly at Tehran’s terror infrastructure as the likely inspiration behind such an operation. “This to me is very much something that could have come from Hezbollah or the IRGC Quds Force, this is the kind of things that they think of,” she said. She speculated that Iran, if responsible, may be trying to unleash a new kind of suicide bomber by infiltrating airlines with radicalized pilots who could launch attacks at any time.
The former intelligence officer rejected any notion that professional training provides immunity from extremist indoctrination. “Just because someone’s a pilot doesn’t mean they can’t be radicalized, people from all walks of life could be radicalized,” Eisin argued. “[Syrian dictator] Bashar al-Assad was a doctor, Josef Mengele was a doctor.”
Oded Ailam, a former deputy head of global operations for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, offered a complementary but distinct analysis. Ailam, now a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, emphasized that recruiting a commercial pilot to deliberately crash a plane would require a far more elaborate process than persuading a young suicide bomber to carry out an attack.
“Recruiting and convincing a pilot to do something like that, it’s not the same as telling a 15-year-old to strap on a bomb and walk into a promenade and explode himself. This is a very sophisticated and long operation,” Ailam explained.
Ailam suggested that Iran may have been able to radicalize the pilot passively, without any formal recruitment, through its vast network of anti-Israel propaganda distributed online and in other venues. “The lone wolf is influenced by the pack of wolves around him, he’s influenced by jihadists, by extremists in mosques, he’s influenced by prominent Iranians calling for death to Israel,” he said.
The former Mossad official warned that lone wolf extremists could pose an even more dangerous threat to air travel than organized terror cells that intelligence agencies can identify and disrupt. “Terror combined with mental disturbances in the pilot, when you combine it together the outcome is horrific,” Ailam stated. “There are a lot of people who are being radicalized who are airline pilots.”
President Trump has also suggested Iran might have been involved in the FlyDubai incident, though he did not elaborate on what basis he made that claim.
The FlyDubai hijacking attempt unfolded when al-Hammami, the Omani pilot, attacked his co-pilot during the flight and attempted to seize control of the aircraft with 174 passengers aboard. Israeli passengers on the flight intervened and managed to overpower him before he could crash the plane, preventing what could have been a mass-casualty disaster.
Eisin added a bitter assessment of international reaction to attacks targeting Israelis. “And if you kill Israelis, the whole world applauds you,” she said.
Ailam predicted the FlyDubai attack will force governments to fundamentally rethink their post-9/11 aviation security measures. He expects airlines will soon need to install new technology allowing crew members to access the cockpit during emergencies to counter potential copycat attacks. “It’s impossible to screen every pilot, the answer will have to be technological,” he concluded.