Brother Says Egyptian Scientist Was Murdered

Saeed Sayd Bidair was a devout Muslim, seemingly happily married with two children and a bright future as one of Egypt’s foremost scientists.

However, on the evening of July 13, according to police, he jumped to his death from a fourth-floor apartment in Alexandria--after slashing his wrists and trying to gas himself.

Bidair’s brother, Samih, disputes the police version, arguing that Bidair was murdered in an elaborate plot staged to look like suicide.

“I’m not seeking vengeance or trying to pin the blame on anyone,” Samih Bidair said. “I simply want to make the point that my brother did not kill himself, and had he done so, he wouldn’t have done it in this manner.”

The authorities were unwilling to provide foreign media with access to officials or their findings.

“I’m sorry we can’t help,” a government press spokeswoman told Reuters in response to a letter requesting access to police and medical records as well as interviews with officials.

“The authorities don’t want to publicize the issue,” the spokeswoman added.

Opposition newspapers in Cairo, noting that Bidair’s demise was the latest in a series of deaths involving Egyptian scientists, have brushed aside prosaic explanations.

The newspapers said the first death was of nuclear physicist Samira Musa in the United States in 1953. In 1980, Yehya al-Meshad, who had worked on Iraq’s nuclear project, died in a struggle with an intruder in his Paris hotel room.

Bidair, 40, specialized in microwave circuitry.

Microwaves can be used to cook the evening meal, but they also play an important role in satellite communications, in missile telemetry and in developing the latest generation of precision-guided weapons.

Don Kerr of London’s International Institute of Strategic Studies said millimeter-wave radar was particularly important to states developing fire-and-forget missiles that locate, identify and destroy targets on their own -- so-called “smart” bombs.

Bernard Blake, who edits “Jane’s Weapons Systems,” identified the link between microwave research and missile telemetry -- communications with missiles in flight -- as a highly-classified defense issue.

Bidair was a prolific writer of technical papers and one of his reports, published two years ago in the United States, focused on millimeter-wave radar.

The Middle East, cauldron of international rivalry, spends more money than any other area on advanced weaponry.

A recent study by the Washington-based Congressional Research Service says that from 1985-1988, the Middle East took two-thirds of all weapons delivered to the Third World.

Until two years ago, Bidair worked in an Egyptian Air Force research and development establishment. Its work is secret.

Then he left for Duisberg University in West Germany and worked as a researcher under the supervision of Prof. Ingo Wolff. He describes the Egyptian as a good scientist who seemed depressed toward the end of his stay.

Bidair had talked of being followed, and of a mysterious fire in his apartment. He had also kept in close touch with his former air force colleagues in Egypt and worked on his own on a computer he had set up in his West German apartment.

According to his brother, Bidair returned home because he wanted to set up his own laboratory here.

Samih Bidair said he had suggested to his brother that he use Samih’s apartment in Alexandria to finish some paper work in peace and quiet before celebrating a religious festival with his family.

Samih believes the scientist would have had considerable difficulty in throwing himself off his fourth floor balcony because the balcony of the floor below juts out 29 inches beyond his.