CAIRO
— Six days after the crash of a Russian charter flight from the
Egyptian resort area of Sharm el Sheikh, the government of Egypt is
finding itself increasingly isolated in its resistance to the
possibility that a terrorist’s bomb brought down the plane.
Britain
has concluded the cause was most likely a bomb. President Obama has
said pointedly that he takes the possibility “very seriously.” After
standing arm-in-arm with Egypt for six days in discouraging any such
discussion of terrorism, even President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday suspended Russia’s flights to Egypt for fear of another attack, stranding tens of thousands of tourists at the resort.
But
the government of Egypt, critically dependent on the money tourists
bring to Sharm el Sheikh’s resorts, has dismissed any suggestion of a
bombing as “premature,” “surprising” and “unwarranted.”
The widening chasm between Egypt and the world, some say, recalls an earlier crash, in 1999, when EgyptAir Flight 990
plunged into the ocean off the coast of Nantucket Island. Although
American investigators said flight records pointed to the decisions of
an Egyptian pilot, the Egyptian government blamed a malfunction in the
Boeing airplane, and 17 years later the Egyptian-American dispute over
the cause is still unresolved.
What We Know and Don’t Know About the Russian Plane Crash
A Russian flight crashed in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt
on Oct. 31, killing all 224 people on board. Officials are
investigating what might have caused an explosion that brought down the
plane.
In that case, the Egyptian investigation was cloaked in mystery and, critics say, politicized from that start.
“I
don’t anticipate the Egyptian investigation here to be any more
transparent than their work on EgyptAir 990,” James E. Hall, the former
head of the National Transportation Safety Board who oversaw that investigation, said in an interview.
The
desires of Egypt’s political leaders to minimize the threat of
terrorism would almost certainly set the course of its investigators, he
said. “The air safety investigators in Egypt are under the thumb of the
government,” he said, “and I don’t think that has changed.”
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has declared most forcefully that a bomb is the most likely
explanation. He took the extraordinary step this week of suspending
flights in and out of the airport for more than 24 hours, until new
security measures could be put in place. About 20,000 citizens are
vacationing in Sharm el Sheikh, and many were scrambling to get home on
Friday morning as flights resumed.
Several
British news outlets, citing anonymous officials, reported on Friday
that the government based its conclusion about a bombing in part on
telephone surveillance of Egyptian militants in the Sinai Peninsula, and
reports focused on the chance that an airport employee might have
planted an explosive.
Mr.
Obama, for his part, raised the same possibility on Thursday night in a
radio interview. “There is a possibility that there was a bomb on
board,” he said. “And we are taking that very seriously.”
Russia appeared to switch sides on Friday, suspending all flights to Egypt, pending a conclusion of the crash investigation.
Under
international aviation rules, representatives from France, Ireland,
Russia and Germany are included in the official committee investigating
the crash because of various connections to the plane or the flight, and
European officials briefed on the inquiry say others in the committee
have urged the Egyptians to disclose more.
But
the rules give the Egyptians control over any public statements, and so
far Egypt has rebuffed admonitions to disclose any preliminary details
of what they may have learned, including whether explosive residue had
been detected, the pattern of burn marks on the wreckage or on human
remains, or of whatever may have been gleaned from the plane’s
flight-recording devices.
A
statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Aviation on Friday conveyed mainly
pique at the British for not only suspending their flights but also
requiring separate planes to carry passengers’ checked baggage home.
“The
British airlines opt to fly without the hold baggage of the British
passengers,” Hossam Kamal, the minister of civil aviation, said in the
statement.
“The
airport will not accommodate more than 120 tons of left-behind
luggage,” he added. “This big volume affects the smooth operation of the
rest of the domestic and international flights.” The burden of the
British baggage, he suggested, had caused the airport to reduce the
number of British departures to eight instead of the 19 flights
previously scheduled, thus prolonging the plight of the stranded
vacationers.
Some who remembered the investigation of EgyptAir Flight 990 saw a recurring pattern.
Hosni
Mubarak, then Egypt’s president, initially requested that Washington
take the lead in the investigation, given the proximity to the United
States and the difficulty of recovering the underwater wreckage.
The
evidence quickly pointed to a suicidal decision by one pilot, Gamil
al-Batouti. He was heard on the voice recorder encouraging the captain
and another co-pilot to leave him alone in the cockpit. He cut the
engine, turned the plane into a nosedive toward the sea and repeated to
himself again and again, “I rely on God.”
The
plane’s speed neared the barrier of sound, and Mr. Batouti evidently
struggled against another pilot’s last-minute efforts to stop its
descent, as William Langewiesche, a journalist and pilot, later
documented in an article
for The Atlantic in 2001. An F.B.I. investigation determined that Mr.
Batouti was facing public humiliation over accusations of sexual
impropriety, including exposing himself to teenage girls and
masturbating in public.
But
as soon as the evidence began to emerge, Mr. Mubarak recalled his
initial representative to the investigating committee, Mamdouh Hashment,
a senior aviation official.
“Mubarak
replaced that team with another team that would follow the government
line,” said Mr. Hall, the former National Transportation Safety Board
chief. “It made it a very long and trying investigation, which it really
did not need to be.”
Egypt’s
new representatives sought at every turn to block any conclusion that
held the pilot, Mr. Batouti, responsible. They repeatedly invented and
advocated increasingly esoteric scenarios, demanding costly and
time-consuming high velocity tests to disprove each thesis.
At
home, the Egyptian state media floated conspiracy theories about
American, Israeli or other plots that might have brought down the plane,
which was carrying dozens of Egyptian military officers. Mr. Batouti
was labeled a “martyr” in the Egyptian press, and the Egyptian aviation
authorities — dissenting from the Americans — ultimately pronounced the
crash a mechanical failure.
“The
government would have viewed this exactly as it would, for example, an
Islamic terrorist act in Luxor — something that we should cover up,”
Hani Shukrallah, a veteran Egyptian journalist, told Mr. Langewiesche.
“So it got politicized immediately. And this became an official line:
You are out there to prove that EgyptAir is not responsible. It became a
national duty.”
In
an interview on Friday, Mr. Shukrallah said the Egyptian government was
just as determined to cover up the possibility of terrorism in the
Russian plane crash: “Oh yes, definitely!” he said.
“There
is a sense — which everyone familiar with Egyptian airports is aware of
— that the security precautions are not as they should be,” he added.
The
fragile state of Egypt’s economy makes any conclusion of terrorism
extraordinarily costly. Sharm el Sheikh had been a bright spot for the
nearly moribund Egyptian tourism industry at a time when a deep deficit
in its balance of trade has forced Egypt to the brink of a currency
crisis. Tourism, especially in Sharm el -Sheikh, has long been one of
its four main sources of hard currency (the others are petroleum
exports, foreign aid and remittances from migrant workers abroad).
Russians
and Britons had been the two largest groups of tourists in Sharm el
Sheikh, and with their departure analysts warn that a further drop in
tourist revenues could have a devastating impact on the economy as
whole. The government has already imposed strict controls on the
movement of hard currency out of the country, even at the cost of making
it difficult for businesses to obtain raw materials and other goods.
But
despite the economic stakes, managing the crash inquiry could prove
harder this time, because of the international representatives on the
investigating committee. The results of the EgyptAir Flight 990 inquiry
places an added burden on the Egyptian investigation this time, analysts
said.
“The
international community is not going to give Egypt the benefit of the
doubt,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a researcher based at the Century
Foundation in New York.
So
if the cause of the crash was not a bomb and Egypt hopes to dispel the
Western fears, “this is going to have to be an investigation that is of
the utmost professionalism and really transparent,” he said.
“They are going to have to go about this in a way that is quite different from the past,” he added.
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