AAPiya YouTuber Dhruv Rathee has once resorted to peddling baseless propaganda, this time about the Flydubai terror scare incident, in which a Muslim co-pilot stabbed Indian Hindu pilot Smit Machchhar, in an attempt to crash the flight carrying mostly Israeli passengers.
In a video posted on 3 October, titled “How did Captain Smit Machchhar stop a Plane Hijack?”, he recounts the 30 September plunge of Flydubai FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv and then steers the audience away from the man who caused it. He names the co-pilot as Omani national Hamam al-Hammami, notes that extremist views had earlier kept him off an Omani flight deck, and describes Captain Smit Machchhar opening the cockpit door after being wounded so passengers and crew could drag the attacker out. He then asks how a co-pilot smuggled a knife onto the aircraft, as if that were the unresolved core of the case.
It is not. The UAE Attorney-General, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, has said the co-pilot attempted a terrorist act, attacked the captain inside the flight deck with the crash axe kept there for emergencies, and tried to take the controls. A crash axe is standard cockpit equipment. It does not pass through a passenger checkpoint. The smuggling question only survives if the prosecutor’s account of the weapon is set aside.
From that gap Rathee moves to the claim that does the propaganda work. Some people, he says, allege the entire episode was a false-flag operation that Israel itself arranged, because an election a month away will decide whether Benjamin Netanyahu remains prime minister.
How did Captain Smit Machchhar stop a Plane Hijack?
FlyDubai Incident Explained 👇 pic.twitter.com/uaFIB1FRiP
— Dhruv Rathee (@dhruv_rathee) October 3, 2026
An Omani co-pilot with a prior extremist flag becomes, in the final frame, a possible prop in an Israeli plot.
The flight was a UAE carrier that left Dubai.
Netanyahu has said his warning the day before, about a possible attack ahead of the 27 October vote, was not a warning about this flight. Monitors at the Combat Antisemitism Movement logged the first false-flag accusation 67 minutes after the distress signal. Within twelve hours, 2,963 posts blamed Israel, Mossad, Netanyahu or Jews. Rathee’s clip arrived after that wave was already running, and after the UAE had called the co-pilot’s actions a planned terrorist act.
The question the known record raises is how a man previously treated as a security risk by Oman Air reached the right-hand seat of an Israel-bound Flydubai flight. Officials cited by ABC News say extremist material was found on him as a trainee in 2024 and that he was shifted to an administrative role. That is a screening failure. It is not evidence that Jerusalem staged an assault by an Omani co-pilot on a UAE jet, using a tool that lives in the cockpit.
Rathee’s video gives oxygen to an unsubstantiated false-flag conspiracy. By entertaining theories that shift suspicion towards Israel while casting doubt on the established account of the incident, he is using conspiracy theories to whitewash or deflect attention from the alleged act of terrorism.
Subscribe to our channels on WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and YouTube to get the best stories of the day delivered to you personally.
