Kenyan authorities announced Thursday that they had found an explosive device on board an Air France fight from Mauritius to Paris that had been forced to make an emergency landing in Kenya on Saturday night.

According to Kenya Airports Authority, Kenyan bomb experts discovered a bomb on board the plane and had been “taken to safe destination for detonation.”

Flight AF 463, which had 459 passengers and 14 crew members on board, had left Mauritius at 9pm local time (1700 GMT) and was due to arrive in Paris Charles de Gaulle at 5:50am (0450 GMT).

It landed at Moi International Airport, Mombasa, before 1am local time (2137 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 said.

“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 object, believed to be an explosive device has successfully been retrieved from the aircraft,” said Kenya Airports Authority later said in a post on Twitter, adding that all scheduled flights to Mombasa were disrupted during the incident but that normal operations have resumed.

The plane was still in Mombasa airport in the early morning, he added.

An Air France spokesman said the airline planned to fly the passengers to Paris from Mombasa on another flight later on Sunday.

While the airline “regrets the inconvenience and the delay that was caused to its customers,” its “priority is to ensure the safety of its passengers,” he said.

(AP)