Official Suggests Flight 990 Downed by ‘Deliberate Act’

In his strongest terms to date, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday that the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 “might be the result of a deliberate act,” but he also lashed out at the media for “a virtual cyclone of speculation” about a possible suicide mission by one of the pilots.

NTSB Chairman Jim Hall, briefing reporters on the status of the 3-week-old investigation, said unfounded speculation threatens to harm the United States’ longtime friendship with Egypt and “has caused pain for the families” of the victims.

“No one wants to get to the bottom of this mystery quicker than those investigating this accident--both here and in Egypt--but we won’t get there on a road paved with leaks, supposition, speculation and spin,” Hall warned.

In recent days, media coverage of the Oct. 31 crash, which killed all 217 people aboard the New York-to-Cairo flight, has been trained on EgyptAir co-pilot Gamil Batouty. Investigators suspect he may have intentionally crashed the plane into the Atlantic Ocean by disabling the autopilot and sending the Boeing 767 into a nose dive.

But one comment widely attributed to Batouty by the media--”I made my decision now”--was in dispute Friday, with some officials questioning whether investigators had misinterpreted the line or whether those words are even on the cockpit voice recorder.

In a sign of a potential rift between investigators for the NTSB and the FBI, several law enforcement sources disagreed on the matter.

Hall refused to discuss a report in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that questioned whether the remark is on the recording, but he strongly recommended that reports on the tape’s contents be regarded with skepticism.

“We have not released specific information from the cockpit voice recorder,” he said, “and any so-called verbatim information you may have heard about the recorder is unauthorized, second-, third- or fourth-hand, and . . . could be flat-out wrong.”

Yet Hall went further than before in suggesting that someone intentionally downed the plane.

In reviewing radar data, flight recorders and other evidence, “our investigators began to feel that this crash might, and I stress might, be the result of a deliberate act,” he said.

For that reason, the NTSB was ready earlier this week to turn over the investigation to the FBI for a criminal inquiry. But Egyptian officials protested, saying there was not enough evidence to warrant that step.

NTSB officials agreed to defer the decision, concluding that they needed to do more work to meet the threshold for opening a criminal inquiry, Hall said. And Egyptian analysts and aviation specialists now have begun re-analyzing the cockpit recording to determine what actually was said in the flight’s final minutes.

The voice recording has become a sensitive subject, partly because of clashing interpretations of religious remarks that Batouty reportedly made while in the cockpit and questions about how they should best be translated from Arabic.

Hall said the process will be a painstaking one, with the U.S. government, EgyptAir, Boeing Co. and other parties providing their own translators. The NTSB already has loaded a Microsoft version of Arabic onto its computers, he said.

One high-ranking former FBI official said the agency shouldn’t be in any rush to take over the case, particularly after the embarrassment caused by the erroneous accusations against security guard Richard Jewell in the 1996 bombing during the Olympic Games in Atlanta.

“If Atlanta and Jewell remain a sore point for the FBI, in this [EgyptAir] situation, you’re adding religious and economic and international . . . sensitivities,” said William M. Baker, the former assistant FBI director who led the investigation into the 1988 crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. “So therefore it’s all the reason more to be correct.”

Indeed, many Egyptians remain concerned that the focus on Batouty is unjustified.

Batouty’s family, fellow pilots and others say he was a content man who had no real reason--personal, financial or other--to kill himself and many other people.

Capt. Walid Murad, president of the Egyptian Pilots Assn., argued that there were many potential mechanical reasons for the crash.

“The autopilot could disconnect if there was turbulence . . . [or] if we had any failure in the electrical, hydraulics or engines,” he said.

Meanwhile, EgyptAir announced that it has begun contacting victims’ families, offering to make available immediate cash advances to deal with financial hardship caused by the crash.

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Times staff writers Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington and John Daniszewski in Cairo contributed to this story.