Face-to-Face With a Hijacker—So He Took a Selfie.
It sounds like something out of a dark comedy, but for one passenger on EgyptAir flight MS181, it was very real.
When a man claiming to wear a suicide vest hijacked the plane mid-flight in 2016, most people on board feared the worst. One passenger, however, responded in a way no one saw coming:
He smiled for a photograph—with the hijacker.
Meet Ben Innes, a 26-year-old British health and safety auditor from Leeds. While most passengers prayed for safety or braced for impact, Ben made headlines by asking his would-be captor for a selfie.
Let’s rewind.
The domestic EgyptAir flight was en route from Alexandria to Cairo when Seif Eldin Mustafa stood up and claimed he was wearing a bomb. He ordered the plane to be rerouted to Larnaca, Cyprus. Chaos threatened to erupt—but somehow, it didn’t.
After landing in Cyprus, most of the 55 passengers were released. Innes remained onboard with a handful of others. What followed wasn’t panic or tears—it was a photograph so bizarre it became an instant global sensation.
The now-famous image: Innes grinning beside Mustafa, whose “suicide vest” looked eerily real at the time. A flight attendant took the photo at Ben’s request. He later messaged it to friends back home with a casual, “Turn on the news, lad!”
His reasoning? “I figured if it was a real bomb, we were all done anyway. I might as well keep the mood light—and try to get a read on the guy.”
That split-second logic made Ben Innes either wildly brave or unbelievably reckless, depending on who you ask.
The world couldn’t decide. Some people called him an idiot. Others praised his composure. Most were just stunned. Who, after all, sees a suicide vest and thinks “photo op”?
Eventually, the standoff ended without harm. Mustafa surrendered. Investigators confirmed that the bomb was a hoax—no explosives, no ties to terrorist networks. Just a man with personal grievances and a fake vest. Egyptian officials later called him “an idiot, not a terrorist.”
As for Innes, he downplayed the attention. “I wasn’t trying to be heroic,” he explained. “It was a surreal moment. I just did what made sense to me right then.”
✅ Conclusion
Ben Innes’ hijack selfie remains one of the most bizarre, head-scratching moments in modern aviation history. It blurred the line between bravery and absurdity, forcing us to reconsider how people react when faced with fear.
Was it foolish? Clever? Naively human? Maybe all of the above.
In that pressure cooker of a moment, Innes didn’t fight or freeze—he smiled. And whether it was a coping mechanism or a stroke of bold intuition, his decision left behind a lasting snapshot of how unpredictable the human spirit can be when faced with chaos at 30,000 feet.
Sometimes, the most surreal responses don’t come from panic—but from a strange, spontaneous need to connect—even with danger itself.