HUMAN rights activists have described the arrest of a suspected Muslim Brotherhood member after his plane was forced to land in Egypt last week as “terrifying.”

Hossam Menoufi Mahmoud Sallam was on a flight from Sudan to Turkey on Wednesday when his plane made an emergency landing in the southern Egyptian city of Luxor.

According to Badr Airlines, the landing was prompted by the smoke alarm going off in one of the cargo holds.

In a statement, the company said that there had been a fault in the system and the plane had been sent to Bratislava, Slovakia, for repairs.

Having disembarked, the passengers were then required to go through passport control in Luxor, the airline said, adding that this was what had led to the passenger’s arrest.

Badr denied complicity, saying that It had “nothing to do whatsoever [with] the actions taken by the Egyptian authorities or against the aforementioned passenger.”

Egypt has not confirmed the arrest of the alleged Islamist activist. But the international human rights platform We Record described his detention as an “enforced disappearance.”

There were calls for a boycott of Badr Airlines in response to the incident, while Mona Seif, the sister of jailed Egyptian Alaa Abdel-Fattah, decried the international silence surrounding it.

“The details of this story are terrifying, similar to what Belarus did with a journalist there, and the world just watched without a strong reaction,” she said.

“A new phase is under way in which civil aviation will land at an airport that is not its destination to hand over political dissidents.”

Mr Sallam was sentenced in absentia to 25 years in jail during a mass military trial of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in which he was charged with a number of offences, including “possession of firearms.”

He has been living in exile in Sudan, from where he makes frequent business trips to Turkey, a country known for its support for the Islamist group.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been banned since the overthrow of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, one of the organisation’s leading figures, in a 2013 military coup.

He died in prison in suspicious circumstances during his trial in June 2019 and there were claims of medical neglect. United Nations experts described his death as “state-sanctioned arbitrary killing.”

In May 2021, a similar incident occurred when the Belarusian authorities diverted a Ryanair flight to Minsk, where far-right activist Roman Protasevich was detained.

Belarus claimed that it was responding to a bomb threat, but the incident led to a raft of European Union sanctions and other punitive measures.

Badr Airlines was contacted for comment.