The testimony of a passenger on board Emirates flight EK209 which returned to AIA while taking off bound for New York sheds more light on what happened. The testimony about the thriller of the flight after information from the CIA about a suspicious person of Turkish origin who was on the aircraft was conveyed on Friday morning by the passenger Yiannis Spyridakis.
As he said, “there was an update from the staff that we are returning to Athens. At first we thought we had misheard the announcement, then the staff informed us that we will indeed be back. They hadn’t said the reason at first. They had said that the plane should simply return to Athens. After our efforts, they said that there was a problem with French airspace.”
Although, as he said, “there wasn’t much disturbance, it just started to have a strange atmosphere as we all wondered what was going on” he then added that “there was concern until the plane landed “because we had monitors we could see the whole way and we understood that he was following a crazy path”.
“At some point we realized something was wrong. Imagine that even the internet that some of us had paid for on the flight was simply cut off. We didn’t even have access to the internet on the plane,” he added.
Describing what happened when the plane landed in “El. Venizelos” Mr. Spyridakis said that “it was announced that the passengers will be disembarked, only those who boarded from Athens, because the plane had come from Dubai in the beginning. There were airport security cars, there were some police cars, but our transition from the plane to the bus was very smooth. Our passports and personal belongings and luggage were checked again.”
“We had a clear picture of the incident when we landed, we opened our mobile phones and through social media we understood what it was about” concluded the passenger of one of the Emirates flights for which the alarm was raised on Wednesday afternoon, clarifying that although initially their they said that they will leave for New York today, Friday (11/11) at 8 pm “late last night (Thursday) it was announced that we will leave at 17:20”.
