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The captain of a Turkish AnadoluJet flight aborted its take-off at Israel's main airport after passengers received plane crash images on their phones.

Israel's aviation authority said the aircraft was taxiing at Ben Gurion Airport when the incident happened.

Passengers and crew were taken off and the luggage reinspected.

Several young Israelis were identified as suspects and are being questioned. The plane departed five hours late after being cleared to leave.

The AnadoluJet Boeing 737, with 160 passengers on board, was on its way to the take-off position when passengers alerted crew that they had received the photos. The captain was informed and decided to return to the terminal.

The Hebrew Ynet news site reported that the images were shared via AirDrop, an Apple service which enables users to send files from one Apple device to another across short distances. All the images were received on iPhones, it said.

The pictures included images of a Turkish Airlines plane which crashed in the Netherlands in 2009 and another plane crash in the United States in 2013, Ynet said.

Passengers were told they could reboard the reinspected plane, which was headed to Istanbul, or stay in Israel.

The incident comes two weeks after another security scare at Ben Gurion Airport. It happened when a family from the US produced a live artillery shell at check-in, which they had planned to take home as a souvenir.

There was pandemonium as travellers fled the area, with one person requiring hospital treatment after falling over a conveyor belt in the rush to escape.