A picture taken yesterday shows the Air France flight from Mauritius to Paris, grounded at the Moi
Internaitonal Airport in Mombasa after a suspected bomb was found on board.

AFP
Paris
A suspicious object made of cardboard and a kitchen timer sparked a bomb scare on an Air France flight yesterday, forcing the aircraft to make an emergency landing in Kenya.
A passenger alerted crew members to the item found inside a toilet on board the Boeing 777, which was carrying 459 passengers and 14 crew members from Mauritius to Paris.
“After analysis it has been indicated that (the bomb scare) was a false alarm,” Air France chief executive Frederic Gagey told a press conference in Paris.
“All the information we have at this stage shows that the object was not capable of causing an explosion that would damage the plane but was rather a mixture of cardboard, pieces of paper as well as a timer,” he said.
He said the “deduction” was that the item had been placed in a toilet cupboard by one of the passengers.
France is on high alert after jihadist attacks in Paris in November left 130 people dead, and is one of many countries taking extra security precautions.
Airlines are especially jittery after Islamic State militants who claimed the Paris attacks also said they were responsible for downing a Russian jet in Egypt in October after smuggling a bomb onto the plane, killing all 224 people on board.
Flight AF 463 left the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius at 9pm (1700 GMT) on Saturday and had been due to arrive in Paris Charles de Gaulle at 5.50am (0450 GMT) yesterday.
But it made an emergency landing at Moi International Airport in Kenya’s southern port city of Mombasa at 12.37am (2137 GMT) “after a device suspected to be a bomb was discovered in the lavatory”, police spokesman Charles Owino said. “An emergency was prepared and it landed safely and all passengers evacuated.”
Gagey said Air France was waiting to hear from Kenyan authorities but that “we will request an investigation to clarify” what had happened.