June 24, 2025
MEDAN/JAKARTA – A Saudia Airlines plane carrying hundreds of haj pilgrims back to Surabaya in East Java from Saudi Arabia was diverted on Saturday after a bomb threat, the second such incident in a week.
Air traffic controllers in Jakarta received the threat through a call on Saturday from an unidentified person claiming that the plane flying route SV5688 from Jeddah to Surabaya would explode. At the time, the plane was flying above Aceh, Indonesia’s westernmost province.
The threat forced the pilot to immediately divert the flight and make an emergency landing at Kualanamu International Airport, just outside Medan, the capital of Aceh’s neighbor North Sumatra.
None of the 376 passengers or 13 crew members on board were injured during the emergency landing.
A search by the Indonesian Military (TNI) and the police bomb squad did not turn up any suspicious objects and the plane was declared safe, North Sumatra Police chief Insp. Gen. Whisnu Hermawan Februanto told a press conference on Saturday.
All the passengers were flown to their destination at Juanda International Airport in Surabaya in the early hours of Sunday.
Authorities said the person behind the threat has yet to be identified because they used a virtual private network (VPN), making the call difficult to trace.
The bomb threat came on the heels of a similar incident on Tuesday, when Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on the outskirts of Jakarta received a bomb threat via email claiming that Saudia flight SV5726 en route from Jeddah to Jakarta would explode upon landing.
The flight, carrying 442 haj pilgrims from Saudi Arabia, was also diverted to Kualanamu airport in Medan. The passengers were later flown to their original destination of Soekarno-Hatta on Wednesday morning.
Unlike the case of the second bomb threat, which was made with an elusive VPN call, authorities managed to detect the email sender’s location as coming from India. They are now probing the possibility of a link between the first and second bomb threats.
Whisnu of the North Sumatra Police said the investigation “involves Interpol because the threat came from abroad”.
The National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT), meanwhile, said it was coordinating with Saudi authorities to locate the sources of the threats.
“The main thing is that we coordinate bilaterally to ensure and verify the source [of the threat],” BNPT chief Comr. Gen. Eddy Hartono said on Saturday, Antara reported.
The Transportation Ministry’s director general for civil aviation Lukman F. Laisa said in a statement on Saturday that his office has communicated with Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) to “jointly improve flight security measures” from bomb threats.
Terrorism and radicalism researcher Rakyan Adibrata suspected that the two bomb threats were linked and applauded the quick response to divert the flights.
“Seeing that it happened twice in such a short time span, I’d say it’s impossible to call it a coincidence,” he said on Sunday, adding that more incidents could happen if the perpetrators and their motives are not immediately identified.