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Israel Says, Co-Pilot Stabbed Captain During Suspected Hijacking Attempt; Democrats Show Signs of Advantage in Early Midterm Voting; Cornell Agrees to Independent Review of Alleged Sexual Assault Case. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired October 01, 2026 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking new details of heroism and terror on a flight bound for Israel. This morning, we see inside the blood- stained plane as passengers jump into action, averting a suspected hijacking. The co-pilot accused of stabbing the captain may have been armed with an ax.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Breaking news, the early vote, a new analysis shows Democrats, not that guy, but Democrats with an advantage in crucial states ahead of where they were at this time two years ago in the early vote.

And this morning, a call for answers after a woman set for execution survives two lethal injections.

Kate is out today. I'm John Berman with Sara Sidner, and this is CNN News Central.

SIDNER: This morning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says a 9/11 type attack has been averted as we are learning new information about the suspected attempted hijacking of the Flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv. Those on the plane and new images are setting the harrowing scene. We want to warn you that what you're about to see is disturbing.

The flight's co-pilot allegedly stabbed Captain Smit Machchhar. You can see the bloody moments after that attack. That captain is being hailed a hero this morning. He was able to fight back against the attacker and managed to unlock the cockpit door. His bravery allowed for quick-thinking passengers to rush in, restrain the co-pilot, and help pull the plane out of its rapid nosedive.

One man described to CNN those horrifying moments in the cockpit and the brave action of his fellow passengers.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. SHOTAV MUSAEV, PASSENGER: He didn't scream at all. He just sat down quietly and went along with it. We used the cord from the headphones, and later they brought us plastic zip ties, which we used as well. We were fully engaged in subduing and restraining him. At the same time, I was helping the pilot. Everyone there behaved heroically, the whole plane, including the children.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: As it stands, we have a much clearer picture as to what happened, but still there are major questions surrounding why.

CNN's Nic Robertson live for us in Jerusalem with the very latest. This was an incredible, incredible save by these passengers and also by the pilot himself opening that door, which has been locked since 9/11 in all cockpits. What are you learning this morning?

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yes. And when you hear some of the new details we're learning from the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today this pilot, the Indian pilot he wasn't just stabbed as we might have thought with a knife but Prime Minister Netanyahu is saying he was stabbed or hit with an ax, and he still managed to survive and get that door open to let the passengers in to restrain the other pilot there who we now know to be an Omani, who, according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, was trying to smash up the equipment in the cockpit and apparently try to cause the plane to crash.

Now, we are beginning to learn a few more details. The Indian pilot we talked about there, the hero severely injured. Israeli passenger on the plane, a dentist said they only just got to him in time. He was losing so much blood. His blood pressure was going down. They thought they might lose him. They managed to stabilize him. We've heard now from officials in India through his family that he has -- the pilot has now been through surgery, is out of the danger zone. So, that's what we know about him.

Now, what about the attacker? What do we know about him? Again, as I said, Prime Minister Netanyahu says he's an Omani. We don't have a name yet. But according to Israeli officials, he was understood to have only been flying for the airline Flydubai, only flying for them for the past eight months.

So, this raises questions, why was he flying this route? That apparently, according to people who know the pilots that fly that route between Dubai and Tel Aviv, that is not normal. We understand that in the UAE, the attorney general there has started opening an investigation into the possibility of a terrorist incident here.

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That's happening.

And Prime Minister Netanyahu says that he expects this attacker, the pilot who did the attacking, to get extradited out of Saudi Arabia to the UAE, where Prime Minister Netanyahu says he has been told by UAE authorities that Israelis will be involved in the investigation. An interrogation is the way the prime minister put it.

So, things are moving forward but we don't know the motivation yet of this attacker. We don't know his name. So, there's a lot about his history we don't actually know right now. SIDNER: So many questions about how he got weapons on the plane, et cetera, et cetera.

Thank you so much. We're looking at pictures inside the cockpit, and also seeing the celebrations happening at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv after these amazing passengers were able to stop this absolute catastrophe.

Thank you so much, Nic Robertson, for your reporting there. John?

BERMAN: All right. New this morning, the early edge appears to go to the Democrats. A new analysis of early votes finds that nearly 700,000 Americans have already voted across at least 29 states. In Virginia, where more early votes have been reported than anywhere else, Democratic-leaning voters outnumber Republican-leaning voters there by about 18 points.

That's up from eight at this point in 2024, and those are the important numbers to look at, the difference between 2026 and 2024. In several states with key races, Democrats have a bigger share of ballot requests than they did in 2024. Of course, we do not know how the people who requested ballots will vote, but this could be an indication of enthusiasm.

Today, the president hits the campaign trail while blaming Republicans for a, quote, extremely poor job of promotion. He heads to Texas to back Senate hopeful Ken Paxton. Just yesterday, The New York Times reported that Paxton told supporters that his poll numbers dropped when President Trump held his midterm convention in Dallas last month.

Let's get right to CNN's Betsy Klein, live at the White House this morning. Betsy, so what's the plan? How's the president going to turn this around?

BETSY KLEIN, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Well, John, it's a great question. The president held this event yesterday ostensibly aimed at celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, but his mind was clearly on the midterms, and specifically this idea that his party isn't doing a good enough job messaging to voters.

But we know the president himself is facing dismal polling numbers, a 35 percent approval rating, according to CNN's poll of polls, and we are seeing some Republican candidates distancing themselves from him and his policies.

But the president is expected to kick off today a packed schedule of campaigning, traveling today to Texas and Oklahoma, all of this part of a strategy to boost turnout among his MAGA base. And the goal, he says, is convincing skeptical voters that things are going well. Listen.

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DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: So, there are, by a lot, more Americans working today than at any time in the history of our country. You can't -- that's a stat. But nobody knows it. That's why I'm doing it myself. That's why I'm doing it myself, Rachel. Can you believe it? I'm going out because nobody's selling it. I'm doing -- we're doing an extremely poor job of promotion and an extremely great job of running the country.

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KLEIN: Of course, privately, Trump officials are conceding that Republicans could lose the House, and they're increasingly concerned about their prospects of holding on to the Senate.

And in this new interview with TIME Magazine, the president was bullish on midterms. He said bad polls were fake, and Republicans would do well. But if Democrats take the House, he said, quote, they'll probably go after me, and I'll go after them.

But there was one other very notable moment in that interview, the president declining to ruling out invoking the Insurrection Act. That is the act that gives a president extraordinary powers to dispatch the military to quell domestic unrest. He was asked in the -- I want to read to you this exchange. He was asked, would you rule out declaring a state of emergency in the lead up to the midterms unless there's widespread violence in the streets? The president said, I don't rule anything out or in. We'll see. You mean the Insurrection Act? The reporter says, yes. And Trump says, no, I've never used it. I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.

Now, the president has previously threatened to take this extraordinary step, specifically during that unrest in Minneapolis around the anti-ICE protests, but officials have been concerned about the political implications. So, a space to watch here, John, and apologies for our technical difficulties here at the White House this morning.

BERMAN: The voice of Betsy Klein, thank you very much for being with us, Betsy. I appreciate it.

Overnight, a botched execution in Tennessee, a woman on death row survives two lethal injection attempts.

And then breaking overnight, new details in the investigation of the alleged gang rape at Cornell University.

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The New York Times says they've obtained more than 1,000 pages from the university's internal investigation. Did the D.A. ever see any of that?

And then a near miss on a wet highway, a car narrowly avoids that truck.

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SIDNER: This morning, Tennessee's governor is ordering an outside review and is halting executions for the rest of the year after a death row inmate survived two attempts to execute her by lethal injection.

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Christa Pike was given two separate doses of pentobarbital. That happened last night. Witnesses say she appeared to be unconscious, but still breathing and even snoring. After more than an hour, the execution was called off and Pike was taken to a hospital.

A media witness described what she saw.

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CATHERINE SWEENEY, WPLN, MEDIA WITNESS: She said that there was a spot that was burning and hurting and asked if that was normal. None of it was normal. I covered all the executions last year and most of the ones this year. We haven't seen anything like it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and murder of her 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer. John?

BERMAN: All right. New this morning, Cornell University has agreed to an independent investigation into its handling of a former student's claim that she was raped in a fraternity house. New York Governor Kathy Hochul says she wants answers about whether the school is doing enough to protect students, and now the local district attorney has reopened a criminal investigation and says he never received a key transcript connected to the case.

I want to get right to the scene is Brynn Gingras, who's following a, a bunch of new developments on this overnight. Brynn?

BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. So we've been talking about this transcript, right, John? Where did it come from? What is it from? Some local media, WCBS, had this transcript. Now, we're learning the Times has it as well, and we're having a little bit more understanding with confidence that this transcript is coming from the Title IX investigation that Cornell University did after this incident happened in October of 2024.

Why is this important? Because it provides so much more context as to what happened, right? They did this thorough investigation. Allegedly, this transcript is about 1,000 pages long, and it certainly gives us an idea of what people knew, what information was shared, right, and why then were no charges filed. That's the main question that's still kind of everybody is sort of asking.

Now, we have confirmation from the attorney who we just heard from today, Jane Doe's attorney, who kind of got ahead of this a little bit with us and basically said that he didn't leak these Title IX transcripts to anybody. The press -- you know, it's not his fault, but he's not really sure who had what information. But he confirmed to us basically that this is what this big document is, and it contains a lot of information that certainly would've been helpful. Some of that information, let's get to it, because it's important. It basically, according to The New York Times, who's reviewed this thousand-page document, it really talks about how this victim -- you know what, she was a sexual assault survivor prior to this incident happening. Again, important context to understand her frame of mind that night when this alleged gang rape was taking place. It also has interviews, according to The New York Times, with the men that were accused. Again, more context.

It also talks about the steps that she took in the aftermath of this incident happening, the fact that at first she felt a little bit of shame. She was seeing that people were talking about her on chat rooms. And then there was one specific chat or one specific message that basically said, this is awful, and that initiated her to actually go and report this to police.

I want to read what Jane Doe's attorney actually said to us just this morning about some of this process. She said -- he said, Ms. Doe's internal processing went from denial to shame and ultimately acceptance that she had been raped by people that she thought were her friends. Her reactions were a textbook reaction to trauma. I am not a mental health professional, but I have seen this many times in my practice.

So, again, this is just so unsettling understanding that there was just so much more information out there. Again, why wasn't it shared? Obviously, Title IX investigations are private within the university, but if the D.A. had that information, would his decision has changed? The D.A., could he have asked more questions to get that information? These are all questions that are still outstanding this morning.

BERMAN: Because the D.A. says what he based his decision on was a six-page condensed version --

GINGRAS: Of this Title IX investigation written statement by the victim of a big, larger interview that the victim had with police at the time.

BERMAN: All right. Brynn Gingras, a lot of questions, and, again, the developments here are coming very quickly. So, stay tuned.

All right, so a fifth person dies, and now a deadly measles outbreak in Pennsylvania is on track to becoming the nation's largest in decades.

And, really, it's like half the episodes of Lassie, if you're old enough to remember Lassie. A dog stops a police officer and leads him straight to its injured owner.

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SIDNER: New this morning, Pennsylvania is reporting its fifth measles-related death in an ongoing outbreak there. The outbreak is on track to become the largest the country has seen in decades. According to the State Department of Health, all but four of the cases have been among people who were not fully vaccinated.

CNN Medical Correspondent Meg Tirrell joining me now. Give us some sense of this, because this isn't just children who ha- have died according to the state because of measles.

MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: No, you're right. And these numbers that we're seeing are, as you noted, getting us into this record territory that we really haven't seen in this country in decades.

So, if you're looking at Pennsylvania, we're now at 943 total cases in this outbreak. They added 119 just in the last week. And as you noted, fewer than 1 percent of those cases were fully vaccinated. 176 people have been put in the hospital. About a third of these cases are in kids under 18 years, but, you know, of these five deaths, one was a 40-year-old woman, one was an 18-year-old, we don't know the details of the fifth death.

But to show you how quickly this is growing in Pennsylvania, you can see we're on the upswing right now as we are headed into the fall and into respiratory virus season. Of course, measles is a respiratory virus.

Now, this fifth death is in Lancaster County, which is sort of the epicenter of this outbreak. 40 percent of the cases have been there. And we know that at least one of the deaths was in a baby who had a disease called Amish lethal microcephaly.

So, we know that this is circulating in the Amish community really down here in Lancaster County, but in other counties across the state as well. And to put this into context, now we have dramatically surpassed the number of cases we saw in 2025 for measles in the United States. We're at 3,659 cases. That surpassed the 2,200 we saw last year.

Now, we are talking about historically going back to really 1991, 1992.

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'91 we had more than 9,000 cases of measles. There were two huge outbreaks that year, one in Philly, one in New York City. There were others as well. We're talking about eight to nine deaths in these outbreaks each year.

So, that is what we are comparing with now when we are talking about the numbers we are seeing in Pennsylvania. And with 943 cases, we are now approaching the size of the South Carolina outbreak that, of course, ended earlier this year. That was at 997 cases.

So, we are getting close to surpassing the size of that, and really going back to outbreaks we haven't seen in 30 years.

SIDNER: Look, there is this political battle that is also going on between Pennsylvania, the governor there, and HHS Secretary RFK Jr. What is happening with that battle? Because the, the feds are saying, hey, we're offering help. The state doesn't want our help the state doesn't trust, because of the, the way that RFK talks about vaccines and has been very critical of them.

TIRRELL: Yes, this war really came out over the way that Pennsylvania was describing these deaths, which it calls measles-associated deaths.

And what that means is that somebody has measles and didn't have another cause of death that could have caused it. But the CDC right now is only recognizing two measles deaths in 2026, and of course, Pennsylvania now saying there are five. The CDC is saying it's reviewing that. It is working on a definition with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists over this.

But this started this sort of battle between RFK Jr. and the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, where RFK Jr. initially accused Pennsylvania of fabricating these deaths. And so there is this kind of battle going on.

We should say HHS is saying that vaccination is the best way to stop measles. And we are seeing in Pennsylvania, a lot of people are responding by getting vaccinated. A typical month the state says they see about 25,000 doses administered, 53,000 in September.

SIDNER: Wow. I mean, that is stark there after maybe learning of all this and it makes you afraid. This is something that was almost or was eradicated, and now clearly it's back.

Thank you so much, Meg Tirrell, for your great reporting. I appreciate it.

Okay. Ahead, developing overnight, shocking new video shows a Russian drone hitting a school in Kyiv and exploding. New details about how the students and staff are doing there this morning.

And officers rush to a burning truck and are able to pull the driver to safety right before it explodes.

Those stories and more, wow, ahead.

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