EgyptAir Flight 181
2016 aircraft hijacking ending in Cyprus
EgyptAir Flight 181 was a domestic passenger flight from Borg El Arab Airport in Alexandria, Egypt, to Cairo International Airport. On 29 March 2016, the flight was hijacked by an Egyptian man claiming to wear an explosive belt and forced to divert to Larnaca International Airport in Cyprus. Most passengers and crew were released by the hijacker shortly after landing. The hijacker surrendered about seven hours later, and everybody escaped from the aircraft unharmed. The belt was later revealed to have contained mobile phones and no explosives. The aircraft involved in the incident was an EgyptAir Airbus A320.
Hijacking
Flight 181 departed Borg El Arab Airport in Alexandria at 06:38 local time (UTC+2) for a short flight to Cairo International Airport, carrying 56 passengers plus seven crew. After takeoff, the captain was informed that a passenger claiming to be wearing an explosive belt was demanding that the aircraft be flown to Cyprus. A passenger later reported that, during the flight, the flight attendants collected the passengers' passports. The plane then started gaining altitude, and it was announced that they were diverting to Larnaca.
“EgyptAir Flight 181” enters the record as 2016 aircraft hijacking ending in Cyprus. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what EgyptAir, Flight and aircraft can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23651626. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “EgyptAir Flight 181” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.