An intruder tried to seize a plane at the airport in Mauritania’s capital Nouakchott Thursday before being arrested, a security source said, with the man’s family saying he dreamed of studying in the US. The security source said that the man “sneaked aboard a Mauritanian plane” that had “no passengers aboard”. He then threatened to blow up the aircraft, a Mauritania Airlines Embraer used for domestic flights, the source said. Transport Minister Mohamedou Ahmedou Mheimid said the intruder had been a young man “known to police” who suffered from mental health problems. “An investigation has been opened to determine the failures that caused this security breach and remedy them in future,” he told national television. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not give details of the man’s identity or nationality and could not say whether he really had any explosives.
Official press agency AMI had initially reported that the man was an “American claiming to have problems with the Mauritanian government”. But in a statement, the family of a young Mauritanian, Soulymane Ould Sidi Baba, said he had been behind the attempted commandeering of the plane. A “brilliant” student of English, he had fallen into a “depression” after “repeated failures to travel to the US” to continue his learning and disappeared two days before the incident, the family said. They added that he had not been armed at any point. The security source told AFP that “gendarmes managed to overpower him after he refused to give himself up”. AMI also reported that the man had been arrested.
