New Delhi: Smit Machchhar, the Indian captain of Flydubai flight 1073 who on Wednesday fended off a mid-air stabbing attack by his co-pilot and enabled his crew to stabilise the aircraft, described that fateful morning in a publicly telecast call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday (October 2).“At that moment, I was fighting for my life,” a visibly injured Machchar told Modi from his hospital bed in Abu Dhabi. Though he lay on the floor wounded, he could tell the aircraft was losing altitude – flight records show it fell almost 5,000 metres in just over 30 seconds – and that he needed to do something to save it, the captain continued.“This will take one last push, Smit. Just do it. The door is right there,” he recalled thinking to himself. “Even at that time I was being attacked. I opened it, everyone else came in [to the cockpit] … I was looking out for my own life, but at the same time I knew I could not let everyone die.”He was reciting the Hanuman Chalisa during his ordeal and believes that God saved him, Machchar, in tears now, told Modi, who hailed the pilot as a source of pride for India.“Today the whole country can say with pride that we Indians are not ones to take lives but to save them,” the PM told Machchar.Passengers aboard flight 1073 – which was carrying 182 people, mostly Israelis, from Dubai to Tel Aviv – have described how the bloodied captain managed to open the cockpit door to let them in before they grappled with the co-pilot and stabilised a descent so sharp that the plane’s rudder was torn away.In the chaos that began about two-and-a-half hours after takeoff, the Boeing 737 Max 8 descended from around 10,000 metres to 5,100 metres in about a minute before making an erratic circle close to the Jordanian border and landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia Wednesday morning local time, according to Flightradar24.FlyDubai said Wednesday that the jet was secured by on-duty crew members “who diverted and landed the aircraft safely”. A regional official said the crew members were pilots-in-training. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.A regional official briefed on the investigation said the suspect, an Omani citizen, was under arrest.Video shot inside the plane by Dr Shota Musayev, a dentist who treated Machchar, shows the co-pilot on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, without giving details, claimed the attacker underwent Islamist indoctrination. He also told Fox News that the co-pilot apparently got through a loophole in Israeli aviation rules that normally bar pilots from flying to Israel if they are from countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv, which is the case with Oman.It was not clear what the copilot – about whom little is known at this point – used as a weapon.With AP inputs