No evidence of explosives on Air France flight: Air France, Kenyan police

Air France and Kenyan police official have said that there no explosives have been found yet in the suspected explosive device found on board an Air France fight from Mauritius to Paris that had been forced to make an emergency landing in Kenya on Saturday night.

Air France chief executive Frederic Gagey said Sunday that a bomb threat that prompted one of the airline's planes to make an emergency landing in Kenya had been a "false alarm".

"After analysis it has been indicated that it was a false alarm," said Gagey of the item that was found in the toilet cubicle on board the plane flying from Mauritius to Paris

"All the information we have at this stage shows that the object was not capable of causing an explosion that would damage the plane but was rather a mixture of cardboard, pieces of paper as well as a timer," he said.

---

Flight AF 463, which had 459 passengers and 14 crew members on board, had left Mauritius at 9pm local time (1700 GMT) and was due to arrive in Paris Charles de Gaulle at 5:50am (0450 GMT). It diverted and landed at Moi International Airport, Mombasa, before 1am local time (2137 GMT).

The cabinet secretary for the interior ministry, Joseph Nkaissery, flew to Mombasa following the incident and said that "six passengers are still under interrogation as part of the probe and we don’t want to talk more before we establish what and who was behind it."

Authorities from France and Mauritius were helping with the investigation "to know how security screening of passengers was done," Nkaissery said.

According to a police official who insisted on remaining anonymous said that one of those being interrogated was the male passenger who reported the suspicious package that looked like "a stopwatch mounted on a box."

French security officials have said it was a "dummy bomb," but Kenya Airports Authority posted on their Facebook page earlier Sunday morning that Kenyan bomb experts had discovered a bomb on board the plane and that it had been "taken to safe destination for detonation."

"It requested an emergency landing after a device suspected to be a bomb was discovered in the lavatory, an emergency was prepared and it landed safely and all passengers evacuated," police spokesman Charles Owino said.

"Bomb experts from the Navy and the CID were called in and took the device which they are dismantling to establish if it had any explosives," he said.

"The object, believed to be an explosive device has successfully been retrieved from the aircraft," said Kenya Airports Authority later said in a post on Twitter, adding that all scheduled flights to Mombasa were disrupted during the incident but that normal operations have resumed.

The plane was still in Mombasa airport in the early morning, he added.

-Third diversion over bomb scare in recent weeks-

An Air France spokesman said the airline planned to fly the passengers to Paris from Mombasa on another flight later on Sunday.

While the airline "regrets the inconvenience and the delay that was caused to its customers," its "priority is to ensure the safety of its passengers," he said.

When the plane landed, passenger John Stephen said crew members helped safely evacuate people using emergency slides.

"We felt the crew member was pretty tense, something was probably wrong at that time. When the plane stopped, he told us to run away to take the slide, to run away from the plane," Stephen told reporters.

"We don't know anything more about this bomb or not, but something that looked like a bomb was in the toilet."

Flight 463 is the third Air France plane to have been diverted in recent weeks after two flights from the United States to Paris were diverted in November after bomb threats were called in but no bombs were found.

France has been in a state of emergency since the 13 November terror attacks claimed by the Islamic State militant group in Paris that left 130 people dead and hundreds wounded.

IS has also claimed responsibility for the October 31rst crash of a Russian passenger plane in the Sinai desert that killed all 224 people aboard.

(staff with AFP)