PARIS: A suspicious object made of cardboard and a kitchen timer sparked a bomb scare on an Air France flight on Sunday, forcing it to make an emergency landing in Kenya.

A passenger alerted crewmembers to the item found inside a toilet cubicle on board the Boeing 777, which was carrying 459 passengers and 14 crewmembers 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.

CEO says there have been 3 bomb scares on Air France planes in US in 15 days

He said the “deduction” was that the item had been placed in a toilet cupboard by one of the passengers and said the bomb scare appeared to be the result of a “bad joke”.

A police source in Mombasa said that police had questioned a number of passengers but were focusing on five of them.

France is on high alert after militant attacks in Paris in November left 130 people dead, and is one of many countries taking extra security precautions.

Airlines are especially jittery after the militant Islamic State (IS) group that claimed the Paris attacks also said it was responsible for downing a Russian jet in Egypt in October after smuggling a bomb onto the plane, killing all 224 people on board.

Mr Gagey said there had been three bomb scares on Air France planes in the United States in the past 15 days.

Flight AF 463 left the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius at 9pm (1700 GMT) on Saturday and had been due to arrive at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport at 5:50am (0450 GMT) on Sunday.

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.

Published in Dawn, December 21st, 2015