NAIROBI, Kenya — An Air France jetliner flying over the Indian Ocean made an emergency landing in Kenya Sunday after a suspicious device was found in the bathroom that turned out to be constructed of cardboard and made to look like a bomb.
Air France Flight 463 was headed from the island of Mauritius to Paris when a passenger noticed the suspicious device. Bomb fears aboard flights have intensified in recent weeks after the crash of a Russian jetliner in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in October, which Western investigators said was caused by an explosive device.
The passenger notified the crew, who alerted the captain, Kenyan officials said, and the plane then diverted from its flight path and made an emergency landing in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa shortly after midnight Sunday.
The plane was a Boeing 777 with 459 passengers and 14 crew members, Kenyan officials said. Everyone was safely evacuated.
Joseph Boinnet, head of Kenya’s police, said in a Twitter message that investigators had retrieved a device and were “determining whether the components contained explosives.”
The chief executive of Air France, Frédéric Gagey, said at a news conference in Paris Sunday that the scare was a “false alarm” and that the device had been made of cardboard, sheets of paper and a timer.
Kenyan media reported Sunday night that six passengers were being questioned in connection with the hoax bomb and that all six would be further investigated by French anti-terror police.
The emergency landing in Mombasa disrupted flights at that airport for several hours, but by Sunday afternoon Kenyan officials said service had returned to normal. “Jambo!” the Kenyan civil aviation authority said in a message Sunday, using the Swahili word for hello. “We confirm of an emergency landing by Air France at Moi Int’l Airport this morning.” Moi International is the name of the international airport in Mombasa, the second biggest airport in Kenya.
The scare was the latest incident to affect Air France and other airlines in recent weeks amid heightened concerns of potential terrorist threats to air travel in the wake of the Oct. 31 crash of the Russian airliner.