A Cypriot Marriage of Egyptian Hell

"Most of the media painted a picture of romance in which a man was trying to reach out to his estranged wife. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. They would have a different opinion if they knew what he was really like."
"It was a marriage of hell with threats, beatings, torture and fear. He was a man who knew how to inflict fear and to create misery around him. He was unbalanced and a scary person."
"This man never cared for his children for one minute, either when he lived here or when he went away. He only offered pain, misery and terror. And even now when he’s in police custody, my children and I are afraid."
Marina Paraschou, Cyprus

EgyptAir plane hijacking suspect Seif Eddin Mustafa, second left, is escorted by
Cyprus police officers as he leaves a court after a remand hearing as authorities
investigate him on charges including hijacking, illegal possession of explosives
and abduction in the Cypriot coastal town of Larnaca Wednesday, March 30, 2016
(AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

Authorities in Cyprus are still attempting to determine how it was that Egyptian Seif Mustafa was able to pass the fake explosives belt he wore through airport security in Egypt. They have asked the assistance of Interpol. Egyptian authorities would prefer this matter to be ignored altogether. The question of security at Egyptian airports has its uncomfortable reference in the passenger jet that exploded en route from the Egyptian Sinai to St.Petersburg with all lives on board lost.

It seems that the man arrested for hijacking an EgyptAir plane heading to Cyprus is not the mentally addled innocent he has been made out to be by Cypriot authorities who jokingly referred to him as a love-lost man missing his wife and setting out to be reunited with her. Whatever his true intentions were it was not to be reunited with a woman who loathed and feared him and whom he himself had little interest in, as a husband and the father of their children.

He was, according to his ex-wife, an abusive drug addict who gloatingly helped to carry out a death trap for three Israeli soldiers as a member of a Palestinian terrorist group. After Seif Eldin Mustafa, 59, made his demands of Cypriot authorities, he was taken into custody once the passengers of the plane were released after a long standoff with police led to his surrender. Which was when he was being portrayed as a love-lost naif.


Marina Paraschou described her ex-husband as a "fanatical" supporter of Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization, who had bragged that he had taken part in the killing of three Israeli soldiers and later spent four years in a Syrian prison. They were married in 1985 when she was 20, and divorced five years later. Contact had been made since then once only when she called to let him know that their teenage daughter of the four children they had together had been killed in a car accident.

Ms. Paraschou recalled bitterly what his response had been: "What do I care? It doesn’t matter she was 
killed", he had said. They had lived together in her parents' home, she said. Her ex-husband had never
worked and when he was unable to support his drug habit, he beat their children. The marriage, she
said, was "the darkest period in my life".

An EgyptAir Airbus A-320 sits on the tarmac of Larnaca airport after it was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus on March 29, 2016 (AFP/BEHROUZ MEHRI)

After their divorce he went to live in Egypt and four years later was imprisoned for forgery and fraud. He broke out of prison during the 2011 Egyptian revolution that had brought former President Hosni Mubarak into prison. And while Cypriot officials described the man as "psychologically unstable", a man who had demanded the release of 63 female dissidents from Egyptian imprisonment, the ordeal ended finally with the man's arrest and passengers and crew safely released.

According to the Egyptian minister of the interior the man had a long criminal record stretching back to 1988. And in Cyprus he had been convicted on six counts of passport forgery, handed a suspended sentence and deported to Egypt on the basis of domestic violence charges brought by his ex-wife. Using an assume Qatari identity he re-entered Cyprus, and was then once again deported back to Egypt in 1990. It seems neither Cyprus nor his ex-wife can rid themselves of this human pestilence.

Little wonder, given his track record as a miserable, violent and wretched human being that Ms. Paraschou and her children are fearful of this man, so much so that even his temporary return to prison is no reassurance to them that they can be shut of his sociopathic attentions.