Ben Innes didn’t know if he was going to die. The Egyptair plane he was traveling on had been hijacked by a man claiming to be wearing an explosive belt, and the aircraft —which was supposed to go from Alexandria to Cairo— ended up making an emergency landing in Cyprus. Anyone in that situation would think about praying, hiding, or simply not breathing too loudly.
Ben thought of something else: asking the hijacker for a selfie.
That’s what happened. This British passenger asked a flight attendant to translate his request to the Egyptian Seif Eldin Mustafa. The guy shrugged —a universal gesture meaning “go ahead”— and Ben stood beside him, smiled from ear to ear, and the flight attendant took the picture. His reasoning, later explained to the tabloid The Sun, was impeccable in its action-movie logic: “If the bomb was real, in any case I would have nothing to lose”. The result was an image that went around the world within hours and that Innes described, without a gram of irony, as “the best selfie ever taken”. 😂
In the end, the belt turned out to be fake. Mustafa released all the passengers, turned himself in to the Cypriot police, and ended up with eight days of pretrial detention in Larnaca while Egypt requested his extradition. Ben Innes, for his part, went home with the photo of his life.
