As Indian Captain Smit Machchhar bravely fought off his co-pilot after being stabbed on the flydubai FZ1073 flight to Tel Aviv, a dentist on board helped stop the bleeding.
“He had very, very deep cuts and we needed many ice packets. But every time I opened the T-shirt to check the bleeding, it would bleed more. So I pressed not very hard and with ice. He also recalled how Machchhar’s pulse went too low at one point and lips turned blue. He doesn’t have much more time’,” he was quoted as saying by The National.
In a conversation with UAE’s The National, 47-year-old Shota Musaev recounted the 45 minutes of him trying to save Machchhar, whom he said was bleeding profusely from the head and the left hand. All through the 45 minutes I kept the pressure on,” he was quoted as saying.
The dentist also said that Machchhar told him he was from India. Recalling what happened on the Dubai-Tel Aviv flight last week, Musaev said he heard screams and calls for a doctor. He said he used many T-shirts to press on Machchhar’s wounds as he was heavily bleeding from some places, but asked for ice when the cloths didn’t help. “At one time, his pulse was too low, so I put his feet up and the pulse came back,” Dr Musaev said. “When I saw his lips were blue, I told the steward, ‘We need to land quickly. Smit Machchhar was stabbed mid-flight by his Omani copilot, an incident that was later termed a “terrorist” attack by a UAE official. The co-pilot was identified as Hammam al-Hammami, an Omani national, according to multiple news agencies. He said he could feel the aircraft going down even after he collapsed from his injuries, but was determined to not let the passengers die.
Smit Machchhar’s first remarks after the flydubai incident came in a video call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday.
