Preventing a madman from taking control of a Munich-Paris flight is the act of bravery performed by Tarik Sahibeddine. A feat that the athlete tells in a hard-hitting book.
August 24, 2018. Tarik Sahibeddine and his wife Nacera return from vacation. It is 5:55 p.m. and, as scheduled, flight LH 2236 Munich-Paris is taking off. Twenty minutes later, Tarik spots a tall guy with suspicious behavior. Agitated, the strange passenger follows and insistently challenges a stewardess. When the skipper intervenes, the young man pretends to give him a headbutt. Tarik is on the lookout: “I scanned the other passengers on the plane, looking for a possible sidekick. But this young man seemed alone.” The team tries to reason with him, inviting him to return to his seat. In vain.
“‘There’s going to be a fight,’ I said to my wife. My partner understood right away, she knows that I can’t sit idly by in the face of danger. And I got up.” Educator specializing in a children’s home within Apprentis d’Auteuil, Tarik is also a former professional boxer, double champion of France, who fought in the most beautiful boxing rings on the planet. Suffice to say that the man is not shy.
The boxer gauges his opponent and decides to start the dialogue
“After our trip to Croatia, we had just gone to Munich, because that’s where I had played my first international fight,” he says. Even if there hasn’t been a scandal yet, his instinct tells him to approach the strange individual discreetly. “There, I hear the guy say to the Lufthansa flight attendant: ‘You’re going to listen to what I say, I’m the boss here.'” Discreetly, Tarik offers his help to the crew, who accepts, grateful. The boxer gauges his opponent and decides to start the dialogue. A psychological face-to-face worthy of those that take place when entering the ring.
“He changed his mood. He laughed, then became aggressive. He tried to terrorize, to impress. At one point, he threatened to open the emergency doors and said: “If the captain does not want to come See me, I’ll go. I’ll take control of the plane and we’ll fly back to Munich!’” The man appears unarmed, but turns out to be inconsistent and unpredictable. Tarik therefore decides to play the temperance card. “Although my fist was itchy, I wanted to avoid the fight,” he says.
“Faced with a crazy guy who wants to hijack a plane, you can’t show an ounce of fear”
While the crew evacuates the passengers to the bottom of the plane, plays the watch. “That day, I was scared like everyone else, he remembers. But it’s an emotion that I learned to manage through boxing. Faced with a crazy guy who wants to hijack a plane, you can’t show an ounce of fear. There’s too much at stake.”
On the front line, Tarik knows he can control the assailant. Joined by the skipper and two travellers, including a policeman, he decides to take action. “I made it clear that I was an educator and that I didn’t want any trouble with the law, because I might rip his jaw out.” He is given carte blanche. Tarik then enters combat mode. A minute later, the imbalance is on the ground, immobilized.
“I too made mistakes when I was young”
For lack of handcuffs, he is tied up with plastic collars brought by the hostesses. And the flight lands as planned in Paris, with its two hundred passengers safe and sound. “After his police custody, the maniac was interned in psychiatry”, recalls Tarik. The end of the story at the judicial level, because if the episode of the Munich-Paris flight made the headlines and provoked millions of reactions on social networks, the madman was declared irresponsible.
“This story has gone around the world but, at the political level, nothing has happened”, notes the courageous sportsman without bitterness. Only the French Boxing Federation gave him a medal. But Tarik didn’t ask for more. “I am not a hero. In my book (In the right way, ed. City), I tell my journey. I, too, made mistakes when I was young, and boxing was my lifeline. Today, with the Auteuil apprentices, I have the chance to set up some great sports and integration projects. What more could you want? I am a happy man.”