EgyptAir crash to be blamed on co-pilot

LOS ANGELES TIMES

WASHINGTON -- The final federal report on the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 is expected to say that the jumbo jet was brought down by the methodical, determined acts of a veteran co-pilot.

The report by the National Transportation Safety Board, anticipated within a few days, will close the probe into the Oct. 31, 1999, air disaster off the New England coast that killed 217 people and has strained relations between the United States and Egypt, its most important Arab ally.

Central to the NTSB findings is incriminating evidence in the plane's two "black box" recording devices against co-pilot Gamil El Batouty, whose personal and professional life appears to have been crumbling in the months before the crash.

But what the report omits might be more controversial -- including implications of suicide and murder.

The NTSB report will stop short of considering allegations by a former EgyptAir captain that one of El Batouty's motivations might have been murder and revenge.

How the Boeing 767 crashed -- plunging 33,000 feet through clear skies without so much as a distress call -- was almost immediately clear. But investigators were increasingly frustrated as they tried to establish why El Batouty nosed the plane over into a dive, repeatedly intoning in Arabic, "I rely on God."

Former EgyptAir captain Hanofy Taha Mahmoud Hamdy said the crash was a vengeful act against an EgyptAir executive. Taha said that Hatem Rushdy, chief of the Boeing 767 pilot group who was a passenger on the ill-fated New York-to-Cairo flight, had reprimanded the co-pilot for sexual misconduct that embarrassed the company.

Taha said the chief pilot told El Batouty that he would not be allowed to fly the U.S. route again. The co-pilot's decision to crash the plane "was a matter of revenge," Taha said.

"Rushdy had said (to him), 'This is your last flight,' " Taha said. "And Batouty's attitude was, 'This is the last flight for all of you, too.' "

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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