Considered the most reckless selfie ever – please, people in India are more reckless – the snap of that British man alongside the Egyptian caused a stir, as the man on the left had a fake suicide belt and was hijacking the plane.

Ben Innes attracted criticism after the selfie was spread around social media, but he has come back defending his decision.

I’m not sure why I did it, I just threw caution to the wind while trying to stay cheerful in the face of adversity.

I figured if his bomb was real I’d nothing to lose anyway so I took a chance to get a closer look

I got one of the cabin crew to translate for me and asked for a selfie.

He [Mustafa] just shrugged OK, so I stood by him and smiled for the camera while the stewardess did the snap. It has to be the best selfie ever.

But, schooled by many – even his own mother, it’s not exactly a selfie:

All we can say is that the picture is clearly not a selfie as everyone has been describing it.

You can clearly see that it is not Ben who is taking the picture. He’s in it but he’s not taking it

But we don’t want to speak about anything until he’s back home.

Innes went on to say that he actually just wanted to see what the belt consisted of:

We were sitting around and I thought, why not? If he blows us all up it won’t matter anyway. It would be the best selfie you could ever send to your mates – better than anything you’d ever get on a night out or on holiday.

But I also thought it would be a good way of getting close enough to have a look at his device to try and work out if it was real.

I could see something taped around his waist and he was holding onto some sort of trigger.

I wanted to work out if it was a dead man’s trigger that would set off the bomb if he let it go.

But he wasn’t the only one to score a picture. Naira Atef, a member of the cabin crew, also posted a happy snap to Facebook. In it, she smiles as she stands next to Seif Eldin Mustafa:

I don’t even know.

[source: smh]