A fake bomb planted on an Air France flight from Mauritius to Paris forced it to make an emergency landing in Kenya on Sunday, reports The Telegraph.
An object described by a Kenyan police official as looking like “a stopwatch mounted on a cardboard box” was found in a toilet on the Boeing 777 airliner, which was diverted to Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the media, told the AP news agency that no explosives were found in the device.
Six passengers have been questioned over the scare.
A French security source in Paris said: “According to what we’ve heard, it was rigged up to look like a homemade bomb but it was not a bomb.”
A French woman who was a passenger on the plane told Europe 1 radio that the device was “heard ticking”.
The head of Air France, Frédéric Gagey, said it was a "false alert".
Mr Gagey, speaking to reporters in Paris, said: "All the information available to us now indicate that the object was not capable of causing an explosion". He declined to describe it as a fake bomb, but said it was a "homemade assembly of cardboard and a kitchen timer mechanism."