An Air France flight from Mauritius to Paris was forced to make an emergency landing in Kenya after a suspicious package was found on board, Kenyan police told Al Jazeera.Flight AF 463, which had 459 passengers and 14 crew members on board, had left Mauritius at 9pm local time (17:00 GMT) and was due to arrive in Paris Charles de Gaulle at 5:50am (04:50 GMT) on Saturday.
Kenyan authorities were working with their French and Mauritian counterparts to determine the
nature of the device, Joseph Nkaissery, Kenya's interior minister said.
"We are in touch with Mauritius to know how security screening of passengers was done. A few passengers are being interrogated," Nkaissery said.
The Boeing 777 landed at Moi International Airport, Mombasa, before 1am local time (21:37 GMT).
"It requested an emergency landing after a device suspected to be a bomb was discovered in the lavatory, an emergency was prepared and it landed safely and all passengers evacuated," police spokesman Charles Owino told the AFP news agency.
"Bomb experts from the Navy and the CID were called in and took the device which they are dismantling to establish if it had any explosives," he said.
The plane was still in Mombasa airport in the early morning, he added.
A passenger who spoke to journalists after leaving the plane in Mombasa described the emergency landing.
"The plane just went down slowly, slowly, slowly, so we just realized probably something was wrong," said Benoit Lucchini of Paris.
"The personnel of Air France was just great, they were just wonderful. So they keep everybody calm. We did not know what was happening," said Lucchini.
"So we secured the seat belt to land in Mombasa because we thought it was a technical problem but actually it was not a technical problem. It was something in the toilet. Something wrong in the toilet, it could be a bomb."
The Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, which lies about 1,000km east of Madagascar, is a favourite vacation destination for French nationals.
France has been under a state of emergency since the November 13 attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group has claimed responsibility for that and the October 31 crash of a Russian passenger in the Sinai desert that killed all 224 people aboard.
Moscow has said that the crash was caused by a bomb on the plane.
Two Air France flights from the US to Paris were diverted on November 18 after bomb threats were received. No bombs were found on the planes from Los Angeles and Washington DC.
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