The first government rescue flight from the Middle East could not take off due to problems “getting passengers on board”, a minister has said.
Technical problems prevented the flight from taking off Wednesday night from Muscat, the capital of Oman.
Home Secretary Alex Norris said the government-chartered plane would leave Muscat for the UK on Thursday, but could not say what time.
Norris told LBC: “It didn’t take off because there are operational reasons… to get passengers on board, and it couldn’t happen in the time it needed to happen. So now it will happen today instead.”
A total of 138,000 people from the UK have registered for assistance, the government said, the majority of whom, 112,000, are in the United Arab Emirates. About 1,000 have already returned on commercial flights, Keir Starmer said.
Two more charter flights are expected to leave the region this week to return stranded British citizens.
Most of the Middle East has been dragged into war after the United States and Israel attacked Iran a week ago. An intense campaign of strikes by the two powers and retaliatory missiles by Iran targeting American infrastructure in the Middle East has plunged much of the region into conflict.
This includes places like Dubai, the world’s largest hub for air passenger traffic and a popular holiday destination for Brits seeking cheap luxury.
The state of the United Arab Emirates was attacked with Iranian retaliatory missiles over the weekend, damaging the luxury hotels Fairmont the Palm and Burj Al Arab, as well as the international airport.
As well as tourists and those living in the Gulf, many people from the UK have found themselves stuck in unfamiliar countries during what was supposed to be a brief stopover in the Middle East en route to Asia.
One of them is Faye Morton, from Horsforth in Leeds, who had been traveling to Seoul, South Korea, to meet a friend when she became trapped in Qatar.
Speaking on Rima Ahmed’s breakfast show on BBC Radio Leeds, he said he was “struggling, I’m not going to lie”.
“I spend most of my days crying, shaking. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I really want to get out of here to see my family.”
Qatar suspended most of its natural gas production after Iranian drones attacked two energy facilities. The small Gulf nation, which historically had a good relationship with both the United States and Iran, also shot down two Iranian fighter jets, it said in a statement Monday.
Morton told Ahmed: “I’ve woken up most nights to the sound of missiles and they’ve been shaking the hotel a bit, which is absolutely terrifying.”
Morton said the Qatari government was advising people to shelter in place, so he had not left the hotel since his arrival. She felt “completely abandoned” by the UK government, particularly as a single woman in a country with restrictive rules on women’s rights and freedoms.
He called on the prime minister to “contact us directly in Qatar and give us some kind of clear path home, or just some kind of hope that there will be some movement, because we haven’t had anything so far.”
“We’re nowhere near Oman… so we just need a vision that there is a way out, because right now it doesn’t feel like that.”
Many of the stranded Britons lived and worked in the United Arab Emirates, prompting criticism that UK taxpayers should not foot the bill for bringing home tax exiles who did not contribute to the national economy and who in many cases had moved there specifically to avoid paying taxes.
In parliament on Monday, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said “we should no longer let them get away with this.”
“Given we rightly expect our armed forces to protect British citizens around the world in a crisis, it is only fair that tax exiles start paying taxes to fund the armed forces like the rest of us.”
