The facts
Australian security agencies, including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team (VIC JCTT), are investigating the time Omani national Hammam al‑Hammami spent in Australia. A source said al‑Hammami was granted a student visa in 2014, arrived in 2015 to start a university course, left in 2017 and had his visa cancelled in 2019. The United Arab Emirates’ prosecutor general said the co‑pilot used a crash axe in an attempted hijack of a flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, during which the pilot was stabbed and the aircraft dropped 16,625 feet (5,067 m) in about 30 seconds. US media reported a deleted LinkedIn profile claimed he studied engineering, while Buckinghamshire New University confirmed a distance‑learning aviation‑management course but no pilot training. The Wall Street Journal said Oman barred him from flying over extremist concerns before he was hired by flydubai. Flydubai has suspended its Dubai‑Tel Aviv service pending investigation.
Our take
So Australia’s security watchdogs are now sifting through the three‑year gap in Hammam al‑Hammami’s student‑visa saga like it’s the holy grail of counter‑terrorism. What the fuck are they looking for? Whether he ordered a flat white or a long black while he was supposedly radicalising? The timeline reads like a bureaucratic comedy: visa granted in 2014, arrival in 2015, departure in 2017, and the paperwork finally stamped ‘void’ in 2019 – two years after he’d already left the country. Meanwhile, Omani authorities had already barred him from flying because of extremist views, a red flag the size of Uluru. Yet flydubai hired him, handed him a crash axe and a passenger‑filled aircraft, and then wondered why the plane nosedived 16,625 feet in half a minute. That’s not a subtle hint; it’s a fucking air‑raid siren. The airline’s response – suspending flights to Tel Aviv – is the corporate equivalent of slapping a Band‑Aid on a gunshot wound after you handed the shooter the gun. Buckinghamshire New University felt the need to clarify that his distance‑learning course didn’t include pilot training, as if that somehow mitigated the risk. In reality, the co‑pilot’s only ‘engineering’ was figuring out how to stab a pilot with a crash axe and send a plane plummeting. ASIO and the VIC JCTT are now treating his deleted LinkedIn profile like a Rosetta Stone, when the story is brutally simple: a known security risk slipped through porous borders, got a job with a budget airline, and tried to turn a commercial flight into a weapon. The whole saga is a symphony of negligence – visa officers rubber‑stamping, an airline hiring a walking time‑bomb, and security agencies waking up too late to stop the disaster. Useless, fucking bastards, every last one of them.
