What we know about the cockpit stabbing on Israel-bound flight

Questions remain about how a pilot managed to sneak a weapon aboard a plane and stab his fellow pilot before it plunged thousands of feet in mere seconds. The attacker was thwarted, passengers said, and the plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.

“We were so scared. We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Aviatar Alevi, a 17-year-old student, told NBC News on Wednesday after he and the rest of the passengers were flown to Tel Aviv.

Here is what we know about the incident and how close it came to resulting in tragedy.

Alevi described a harrowing scene aboard the flight, with people “screaming, running, panicking, blood.”

“At the start, I thought it was a plane malfunction, but then I started hearing screaming about the stabbings,” he said.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said, adding that the possibility of death “was definitely an option.”

Another passenger, Motti Cohen Or, 70, said that he heard a woman shouting that “someone is stabbing someone in the cockpit” before the aircraft dived “toward the ground.”

Yaniv Hayun was pictured in a bloody T-shirt telling cameras he had been among those to enter the cockpit and subdue…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/world