British Passenger Took The 'Best Selfie Ever' With Egyptian Hijacker

There was a strange viral shot that snapped the Internet Tuesday. One British man, who took a selfie of himself smiling with the hijacker of EgyptAir's short-haul flight said  he was "not sure why" he asked for the shot.

He did have an explanation for why he approached 59-year-old Seif Eddin Mustafa, though. Ben Innes, the 26-year-old from the northern English city of Leeds, said to Sun that he was "trying to stay cheerful in the face of adversity."

Mustafa, with "explosives in his belt" had pressurised the flight's pilot to take Airbus 320 to Cyprus. When it landed at the southern Cypriot city of Larnaca, he sparked an eccentric, six-hour standoff with the officials, with some "incoherent" demands from the Cypriot President.

Innes was among the seven, including three passengers, who were detained by Mustafa for hours after the rest had been released. He said the hijacker's "suicide belt" might not be real.

"I figured if his bomb was real, I'd nothing to lose anyway, so took a chance to get a closer look at it," he told the paper. "I got one of the cabin crew to translate for me and asked him if I could do a selfie with him. He just shrugged OK, so I stood by him and smiled for the camera while a stewardess did the snap."

Innes did turn out to be right, as the belt had "telephone cases" not explosives, even though they did a good job of looking like bombs.

Innes was released along with the others before Mustafa got arrested by the anti-terror police.

No one seemed to be flummoxed by this bizarre act. One friend told Daily Telegraph, "Ben is a wild man and this is totally in character for him. He ... didn't have much respect for authority."

The Cypriot and Egyptian officials were derisive about the hijacking after it became clear that Mustafa had no connection with a terrorist body.

Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades, when asked whether it was about a woman, replied: "Always, there is a woman," which threw a different kind of explosive into the room.

Another Egyptian Foreign Ministry official just dismissed Mustafa. He was "not a terrorist, he's an idiot. Terrorists are crazy but they aren't stupid. This guy is."