It's all Greek to me It's all Greek to me

Israeli doll sparks bomb scare on Cyprus flight

Box marked ‘booba,’ Hebrew for doll, mistaken by airline cleaner as ‘bomba,’ the Greek word for bomb

By ToI Staff 31 May 2016, 7:40 pm

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File: An Aegean Airlines flight arrives at London's Heathrow Airport (Public domain/Wikipedia/Adrian Pingstone)

An Israel-bound flight from Cyprus was briefly held up on Tuesday after an airline cleaner misread the label on a box, mistaking the Hebrew word for “doll” for the Greek word for “bomb.”

The Aegean Airlines janitor panicked after he discovered the parcel marked “booba,” or doll in Hebrew, and read it as “bomba,” the Greek for bomb, according to Reuters.

The incident caused a brief delay as police swept the passenger jet in Larnaca.

“Cyprus’s civil aviation authority checked it and there was no problem. There was a small delay, but the alarm was lifted immediately,” an Aegean Airlines spokeswoman told Reuters.

In January, a group of Jewish Israeli travelers forced Aegean Airlines to take two Arab co-nationalists off a flight from Athens to Tel Aviv for fear that the pair could be terrorists.

During the incident, the Israelis stood up and prevented the flight from taking off, the airline said. The two men were compensated for the incident and flew to Israel on an El Al flight the next day.