By Mohammad Baali
Albawaba.com - Cairo
Families of the victims of the doomed EgyptAir flight which crashed in October, 1999 rejected a report of which excerpts have been published by the US press as the final report, which pins responsibility for the tragedy on the flight’s first officer, Gameel Al Batouti.
The EgyptAir Boeing crashed into the Atlantic shortly after take-off from New York.
A preliminary report handed to the Egyptian authorities on Thursday backed the same theory, without mentioning the word “suicide,” which was at the beginning used to explain why Batouti caused the accident killing the 217 passengers and crew on board.
Meanwhile, the families assailed EgyptAir for “compromising its right to take part in the investigations” carried out by the US aviation authorities, and called in a statement for involving them in the investigations as a separate party.
At a press conference held by the distraught families at the offices of the Umma newspaper in Cairo on Sunday evening, their lawyer Atef Labib Nigmi said that his clients “reject the report and trust EgyptAir’s pilots.”
Nigmi voiced his suspicions over the report, claiming that “weird things happened during the US investigations,” not ruling out a conspiracy.
The lawyer complained that the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), declined to provide him with copies of forensic reports of the victims.
“The board, instructed by Boeing, also refused to respond to my questions,” he charged.
On the other hand, Nigmi stressed that the families’ reaction towards the report is totally independent from the government’s refusual to accept the report.
Egypt has to respond to the initial report within 60 days.
He said that the security authorities in Egypt “placed pressures on us to prevent us from talking to the press, adding that the conference was held without a permission from the government.
He did not rule out the existence of "American political pressure on Egypt" to make it accept the report.
The families of the victims "do not have political considerations and are not concerned by diplomatic relations between Egypt and the United States." said Nigmi.
“The families of the victims will not compromise the blood of their sons because some people are claiming that a pilot wanted to commit suicide, as if we were living an Arabian Nights' story,” he concluded.
The NBC TV has cited the “final report” as saying that Batouti was behind the catastrophe, which cannot be attributed to a mechanical fault, according to the investigators.
According to AFP, Egyptian Prime Minister Atef Ebeid was due to meet Sunday with civil aviation officials to discuss the preliminary report that the NTSB gave Egypt on Thursday, according to the press.
"The Egyptian response will include a rebuttal and an argued analysis of each point of the (NTSB) report," EgyptAir's managing director Mohamed Fahim Rayyan told press Saturday.
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
