The hijacker of an EgyptAir plane Tuesday morning was identified by Cypriot and Egyptian officials as Seif Eldin Mustafa, 59.
Mustafa, an Egyptian living in Cyprus, told the pilot that he was wearing a suicide belt and threatened to detonate it. The suicide vest he said he was wearing was later confirmed as fake, Reuters reported.
Conflicting reports identify different motives.
Cypriot officials said the hijacker initially demanded that the plane fly to Turkey but later agreed to let it land in Cyprus after pilots told him they didn't have enough fuel for a longer flight,
.
A state broadcaster in Cyprus reported that Mustafa demanded the release of female prisoners
and called for a meeting with his former wife, who lives in Cyprus. Witnesses said that when the plane landed, the hijacker threw a four-page letter, written in Arabic, onto the tarmac, and asked that it be delivered to his ex-wife,
. The ex-wife ultimately visited the airport and helped persuade Mustafa to surrender, the Cypriot broadcaster reported.
Mustafa eventually allowed everyone on board the plane to exit over the course of six hours, and no one was injured.
Mustafa, who lived in Cyprus until 1995, is a former Egyptian army officer who married a Cypriot woman with whom he had five children, including a daughter who died in a car crash, according to Cypriot news reports that could not be immediately confirmed. He and his ex-wife divorced in 1994, the Associated Press reported.
During a press conference, Cypriot President Nico Anastasiades said the incident "
."
Twitter users later joked about the potential motive.
An investigation into Mustafa's motives is still underway.
After Anastasiades released a statement during the news conference, he was criticized for comments regarding Mustafa's motive.
When a reporter asked if a woman was involved in the incident, Anastasiades chuckled and said, "Always there is a woman involved."
Social media users criticized Anastasiades on Twitter:
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