A jihadi hiding in plain sight? A trail of extremist online posts, a confession he wished to 'die a martyr'... warning signs of British-trained co-pilot turned 'hijacker'

On July 10, 2019, the then Prince Charles opened a £75million state-of-the-art pilot training centre a couple of miles south of Gatwick.

After testing out a cutting-edge flight simulator, the King appeared on an impromptu stage alongside former aviation minister Baroness Vere to unveil a plaque, joking during the ceremony that flying in his heyday was 'by the seat of your pants and by dead reckoning'.

The six flight simulators at Acron Aviation, one of the country's largest flying schools, have since been crucial to training the next generation of commercial pilots globally.

Today, two are proudly displayed at the entrance to the international company's imposing UK headquarters, close to the West Sussex town of Crawley.

Online blurbs for the flight training school say that pathways to becoming a pilot can take you from 'little or no flying experience to a fully qualified airline pilot' in around 70 weeks, and you can secure a place on one of its courses with a deposit of as little as £3,000 (although the overall cost is a hefty £94,500).

The 'London Training Centre' at Gatwick advertises 'student-style accommodation', plush restaurants and break-out rooms and trades on its proximity to the capital, where aspiring pilots, presumably from overseas, are told they can visit 'iconic landmarks such as Big Ben, [the] Tower of London and Buckingham Palace'.

What Acron employees are today less keen to discuss, however, is the fate of one of its former trainees from abroad.

For just a year or so before Charles attended the grand opening of the London Training Centre (then owned by L3Harris Commercial Aviation, before being sold to Acron Aviation last year), it is understood Hamam al-Hammami had recently become one of the pilot academy's recruits.

Then aged in his early twenties, al-Hammami – who had spent his teenage years living in Syria and has an Omani father and Syrian mother – successfully applied for a spot in the L3Harris Airline Academy which eventually set him on a path to flying passengers on commercial airlines around the world.

Until last week that is, because it was al-Hammami, a co-pilot on a budget airline flight from Dubai to Israel, who is suspected of attempting to hijack the aircraft and crash it into Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport or a tower block in the city in an attack 'akin to 9/11'.

It is claimed Al-Hammami used a crash axe kept in the cockpit to attack pilot Smit Machchhar two-and-a-half hours into the journey.

His attempt to take sole control of the aircraft to commit what was described by the Israeli authorities as an 'attempted jihadist terror attack' came after he had undergone 'Islamist radical indoctrination'.

Nothing short of miraculously, a bloody Mr Machchhar managed to open the cockpit door and call for help, at which point heroic passengers overwhelmed the attacker – of which more later.

The plane, which fell 17,000ft in around 30 seconds, was pulled out of its plunge by a sewage-truck driver who told the Daily Mail he used knowledge gleaned from watching aviation documentaries to pull off his life-saving move.

It was then landed in Saudi Arabia by two off-duty pilots who happened to be on board and al-Hammami was taken into custody.

Interrogated in the UAE over the past few days, he has given a 'detailed confession' to prosecutors, outlining his motives and allegedly explaining that he wanted to carry out an atrocity 'as revenge for Gaza' and wished to 'die a martyr'.

The UAE attorney general Hamad Saif al Shamsi said that al-Hammami had been 'intensifying his exposure to material promoting terrorism and training in boxing under a private coach' in the lead-up to the hijacking. 

And it has since emerged that now-deleted social media posts indicated he was an angry young man, who espoused conservative Islam, saw women as 'rotten meat' and fomented hate.

All of this begs serious questions. Was this seemingly bright and aspirational twentysomething – who not only studied in Britain (including a distance learning course at a Buckinghamshire University) but also Australia and New Zealand – a jihadi hiding in plain sight who should have been stopped sooner?

Worryingly, he would later go on to describe his five years spent studying in the West as the 'golden years' of his religious commitment.

In fact, when explaining how he prepared for the attempted hijacking, al-Hammami revealed he had watched radical terror videos and read extremist literature while studying engineering at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2017.

He also made the disturbing confession that, while in Melbourne, he became involved with an Islamist preacher called Samir Mohtadi, who has referred to Zionists as 'bloodsuckers'. 

Was al-Hammami spurred on to take radical action by a toxic combination of radical Islam and the so-called 'manosphere'?

The latter refers to a relatively recent online phenomenon dominated by the likes of Andrew Tate, the so-called 'king of toxic masculinity', who is currently facing charges of rape and sex trafficking in Britain.

Back at Acron's HQ, some eight years after it is understood al-Hammami began his studies in Britain, it is clear the aspiring pilot would have had access to all the conventional attractions of suburbia.

Opposite the office is a retail complex housing branches of Sainsbury's and Greggs and there are a McDonald's and Starbucks nearby.

Local workers flit about drinking coffees and dog walkers meander the streets in the nearby Three Bridges neighbourhood.

When al-Hammami began training at the L3Harris Airline Academy, as it was then known, in around 2018, there were also bases at Bedfordshire's Cranfield Airport, Bournemouth and Southampton.

While there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Acron, the company declined to say where al-Hammami was based. Approached by the Daily Mail this week, one guard at its impressive premises said: 'I'm not saying no one remembers him, I'm just saying there is no one here that can help you.'

Asked about the due diligence it performed on al-Hammami, a spokesman for the company said: 'Our thoughts are with everyone affected by this incident. As this is an ongoing investigation, we are unable to provide further comment.'

But his commitment to pursuing a career in aviation has since been linked to his desire to carry out a 9/11-style attack, the UAE attorney general revealed. 

To piece together what led this seemingly aspirational young man to allegedly attempt to pull off such an atrocity, the first place to look in our digital age is social media.

While his account on Twitter (now X) under the name @pilothamam has been deleted, many posts remain archived on the internet.

An Omani national, al-Hammami spent time in the UAE as a child before moving to Syria in 2011, the year the nation was engulfed by the Arab Spring.

He spent four years in the country as it was beset by civil war and later wrote on X that he was 'raised on religion, morals and virtue'.

By 2015, al-Hammami was in Australia on a student visa, where he is said to have studied engineering at RMIT University in Melbourne for two years – but failed to complete his studies and left without a degree.

Reports suggest that, during this time, al-Hammami visited radical mosques and frequented extremist websites and the Australian authorities are currently conducting a multi-agency probe into his time in the country.

It was at this point that he seemingly turned his attentions to completing professional pilot training.

We now know that, between November of that year and May 2019, al-Hammami obtained a six-month student visa to undertake flight training with a 'UK-based company no longer operating in New Zealand.'

We understand this to be Britain's L3Harris Airline Academy, which was working with a flying school in the city of Hamilton at the time, and police in New Zealand are also conducting enquiries into the time he spent there.

By 2020, al-Hammami is understood to have returned to the Omani capital of Muscat, where he embarked on a distance learning course in aviation run by Buckinghamshire New University in High Wycombe.

The Foreign Office regularly vets students from overseas studying 'sensitive' subject areas, such as aviation or aeronautical engineering, under the Academic Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS), introduced in 2007, amid concerns that people with improper motives were targeting British universities. However, this does not affect students studying remotely from outside of the UK.

A spokesman for the university says his course 'focused on the business, management and operational aspects of the aviation industry'.

He adds: 'It was delivered entirely online, pilot training formed no part of the course, and there was no requirement for students to attend the university in person in the UK. Assessment was completed through coursework and other online assessments.'

Be that as it may, it was during his time studying with the British university that he began to feel more comfortable espousing his views online.

Among more than 3,000 posts on what was then known as Twitter, al-Hammani did enthuse about flying, describing it in one post as 'not a routine job' with 'unforgettable moments… like your first solo flight and your first landing with passengers.'

In another, he said: 'The best thing about flying is that you don't follow a specific routine. Every day you work with a different captain and cabin crew, and every day you fly to a new destination, which makes the job very enjoyable and never boring.'

But by 2021, however, al-Hammami was espousing a strict interpretation of Islam. He said he was looking for an arranged marriage and the woman in question must wear a face-covering niqab and agree not to work outside the home.

In 2022, he said he had 'never touched a girl in my life', adding that 'God has protected us from temptations. I would not chase after cheap, rotten flesh.'

Describing his thoughts towards women, he once wrote: 'Her only obligation is to lift her legs.' And in another sign of his familiarity with the lexicon of the manosphere, he used words such as 'alpha' to describe strong men.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone enjoying a career in the airline industry, he also railed against mixed-gender workplaces, saying they had a corrupting effect on women.

'How many respectable, religious girls have been ruined in mixed-gender work environments and manipulated?' he asked. His Twitter account also included references to women being 'stomped on' and given a 'pre-emptive slap'.

Little wonder, then, that reports suggest al-Hammami was barred from flying by Oman's national carrier, Oman Air, over concerns about his increasingly 'extremist' views.

Following a stint working for Royal Air Maroc, the Moroccan national flag carrier where it is believed he did not gain permission to fly, al-Hammami was eventually hired as a pilot by UAE-based budget airline flydubai. And it was this role that gave him access to the flight to Tel Aviv on September 30.

Georgian dentist Shota Musaev, 47, was among the passengers on board. He told the Daily Mail that the aircraft banked sharply before a woman shouted: 'Knife, knife!'

He was one of four men who rushed into the cockpit. 'The first man, who was closest to the cockpit, rushed inside and saw that one pilot was covered in blood while the other was still stabbing him violently,' he says.

'He grabbed the attacker by the neck and dragged him out. We brought him down and pinned him to the floor. They also brought out the badly wounded pilot, and that was when I got involved. We tied the terrorist up, binding his hands and feet.

'The pilot was losing a tremendous amount of blood. His arm was badly slashed, as was his neck, and he had a very deep wound at the back of his head. Everything in the cockpit was covered in blood, but he was conscious.'

He said the attacker, believed to be al-Hammami, begged passengers to 'kill me'.

Grandfather Yaniv Hayon, from Israel, was another of the heroes who took on the hijacker. He had been celebrating his wedding anniversary with his wife in Vietnam and was returning home via Dubai.

Mr Hayon says that when he reached the cockpit the hijacker was 'on his knees' over the aircraft's controls while the bloodied captain was injured on the floor.

Of the hijacker, he said: 'I grabbed him by the throat. It was instinct. I pushed him out towards the exit and started shouting for people to come and help because he was resisting very strongly.'

After the pilot had been subdued, Mr Hayon says he 'leaned over the pilot's seat with my arms forward and pulled the controls back towards me because the aircraft was pointing downwards. I pulled back on the controls. It was only for a few seconds.'

He later helped tend to the injured captain and told him: 'Nobody is going to die today.'

Nine hours after the attack, in a post which may have been pre-prepared and timed, an online social media account in al-Hammami's name praised Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's former leader.

Questions continue to swirl about the security lapses that enabled al-Hammami to fly the Tel Aviv route in the first place.

Israeli aviation rules are intended to prohibit pilots from countries which do not have formal diplomatic relations with the country, such as Oman, from operating flights.

But perhaps more pertinently for Britain, why did al-Hammami believe the West sparked his 'golden years' of religious commitment? And should he have been welcomed here in the first place?

Additional reporting Natalie Lisbona