A prominent Australian couple who sold the most expensive house in the country were on board the Flydubai plane, as new details emerge of the co-pilot’s suspected “suicidal” hijacking mission.

Steven and Carol Moss, a Jewish couple from Sydney, were reportedly among 174 passengers flying from the United Arab Emirates to Israel on Wednesday (local time).

The Mosses were heirs to the Katies fashion empire co-founded by Mr Moss’s late father Sam Moss, a Holocaust survivor, in 1954 before selling to Coles Myer in 1985.

In November 2022, Steven and Carol made real estate history when they sold their mansion on the hill in Sydney’s exclusive Point Piper for a record $130 million.

Steven and Carol Moss were reportedly on the flight.

The Scottish baronial home, Uig Lodge, which they purchased in 1996 for $9.2 million, was sold to Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar and his investment banker wife Kim Jackson.

At the time it was the most expensive transaction for an individual house and still holds that title.

The couple had previously sold another Point Piper waterfront property, Edgewater, as part of a $95 million deal in 2020.

The Australian contacted Moss but he declined to comment, telling the newspaper that he and his wife were focusing on their recovery.

The couple were reportedly prominent supporters of Sydney Jewish schools and Tel Aviv University.

Uig Lodge, at Sydney’s exclusive suburb of Point Piper, is Australia’s most expensive house. Photo: realestate.com.au

As investigations continue, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the co-pilot accused of stabbing the flight’s captain had been indoctrinated by Islamist ideology and was intent on crashing the plane.

Netanyahu said it was “clear he was suicidal”.

“That’s not a question. It was clear he was going to down that plane.”

The prime minister told Fox & Friends that after passengers tied up the co-pilot with a headphone cord, he started begging for the flight crew to “kill me, kill me”.

Disaster was averted on Wednesday’s Flydubai ‌flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv after the wounded captain managed to unlock the cockpit door, allowing passengers to subdue the attacker.

A reserve crew that had been aboard landed the plane, which had more than 170 people ‌on board, at Tabuk airport in Saudi Arabia.

“We know that he underwent Islamist radical indoctrination. That appears to be something we are gathering from his personal information,” Netanyahu said.

Indian Captain Smit Machchhar has been hailed a hero for opening the cockpit door. Photo: Israel Foreign Ministry

Two Israeli security officials said Israel’s initial assessment was that the co-pilot, identified by Israel as an Omani citizen, was likely acting alone although the investigation was still ongoing.

The flight plunged more than 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds during the incident as it flew over Saudi Arabia on the journey from the United Arab Emirates to Israel, according to the flight-tracking website Flightradar24.

Netanyahu said it was clear that the ‌co-pilot intended to crash the aircraft.
“It looks very ‌likely that he was going ⁠to down the plane,” Netanyahu said.

Coupled with “the Islamist tendencies, that radicalisation that are found in his background, I think that’s … a pretty good ​clue,” he said, without elaborating.

“But again, I don’t make final conclusions yet. But that’s the indications we have now,” he added.

The United Arab Emirates has started investigations seeking to establish the circumstances and motives and determine “whether the incident was linked to any terrorist activity or purpose, or involved prior planning or direction,” the UAE state news agency reported on Thursday.

Israeli envoy to the UAE Yossi Shelley told Reuters it was too early to draw conclusions and no motive had been determined.

Another Israeli official said Israel was not receiving all the information it sought from Saudi authorities and that the Israeli intelligence services Mossad and Shin Bet ⁠were investigating the incident as well.

Netanyahu identified the attacker as an Omani citizen.

Omani authorities have not commented.

“We have constraints that say you can’t have pilots from countries that don’t have diplomatic relations with Israel. So obviously ​he was able ‌to go through that,” Netanyahu told Fox.

In a separate interview with Fox News, Netanyahu said the attacker was being investigated in Saudi Arabia and he believed that he would be taken to the ​UAE.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday that Israel’s preliminary information indicated that the co-pilot aimed to crash the plane, describing him as ​a ​terrorist, although Netanyahu only described it as “a serious security incident”.

The incident heightened security ‌fears in Israel weeks before Israelis vote in the first election since the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, with Israel’s security figuring prominently in the campaigning.

Netanyahu and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have hailed the flight FZ1073 captain and Indian citizen Smit Machchhar as a hero.

The pilot was recovering well, the Indian embassy in the UAE said on X.
Israel has also lauded passengers who subdued the attacker.

Yaniv Hayun, one of the men who incapacitated the attacker, described running to the ​cockpit as the plane nosedived.

“We pulled the assailant out, I pulled him out. After I pulled him out we took control of the plane, I pulled up the yoke (steering control of the plane), ​I straightened the plane out a bit,” he said, ⁠talking to reporters upon his return to Israel on Wednesday.

-with AAP