Posted on 07/05/2002 9:53:22 AM PDT by Fithal the Wise
Hashem Mohamed Hadayat, 41, who gunned down Yakov Aminov, 46, and Vicky Hen, 25 – both from Los Angeles - on the 4th of July at the El Al terminal of Los Angeles, and wounded 7 others, is revealed by DEBKAfile’s intelligence and counter-terror sources as a Muslim extremist. During his ten years in the United States, he was a secret operative of the Egyptian Jihad who maintained undercover links to the same Jihad cell in Brooklyn, New York, as the “blind sheikh” Abdul Rahim Rahman and Ramzi Yousef. Both are doing time for perpetrating the first attack on the New York World Trade Center in 1993.
Hadayat is also believed to have abetted a previous, contrived airline disaster: On October 31, 1991, an Egyptair Boeing 767 Flight 990, which also took off from Los Angeles airport, never reached its destination of Kennedy, New York. The plane plunged into the Atlantic off the Nantucket Island, Mass. coast, killing all 217 passengers and crew. In a special probe, the US National Transportation Safety Board found that the copilot Gameel el-Batouty was at the controls when the plane went into its dive. His voice was recorded shouting, “I put my faith in Allah!”
The report held back from referring more directly to the Egyptian copilot’s responsibility for the crash. Our sources affirm that Hadayat, who lived in Irvine, California, 70 km south of Los Angeles, knew Batouty well. There are also indications that, in the years 1998 and 1999, Hadayat was in touch with a group of high Egyptian air force officers and helicopter pilots posted at the time at Edwards Base north of Los Angeles. They were there to learn how to install command and control centers in Egypt’s air defense systems, operate anti-air missile batteries and fly Apache gunships. Most of those officers were on the doomed Egyptian airliner after completing their courses.
Although the long-delayed US Transportation Board report never referred to the presence of this high-ranking Egyptian air force delegation on the flight, DEBKAfile ’s Washington sources reported at the time that most of the investigators were satisfied that Batouty could not have seized control of the Boeing 767 without the aid – certainly the compliance - of those officers.
Two years ago, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak exerted all his influence on President Clinton to keep the federal board’s findings out of its published report and, above all, the fact that a group of Egyptian air force officers was on the plane. He warned that citing the Egyptian copilot as deliberately causing the crash would have a negative effect on Egyptian-US relations. The report therefore fell short of clear conclusions. Hadayat’s murderous attack on El Al flight 106 passengers points back to the Egyptair 990 disaster of 1991, reviving the many questions left open by that earlier, half stifled inquiry, which carefully stepped round any suggestion of terrorism. It also raises the question of how many sleeper cells the Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda’s primary operational arm, maintains in American cities.
Hadayat struck the El Al ticket line on his 42nd birthday. The initial FBI inquiry found through records of his fingerprints at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which issued him with a limousine license, that he was married with at least one child, and had lived in Irvine for the last two years, working on a green card. Since the attack, the possibility that he arrived in America as a sleeper terrorist must be seriously addressed. US investigators realize he was not a lone operative and are seeking his accomplices in such matters as setting up the hit, providing the guns he carried and intelligence on the security situation at the Tom Brady terminal.
DEBKAfile’s Middle East intelligence sources report that early Friday, Egyptian intelligence officers picked up Hadayat’s relatives and associates in Cairo, to try and trace the identities of his fellows in the American Jihad cell.
Debka usually knows these sort of things, though. Even the Debka haters (a strange lot) admit that.
Debka was the first I saw yesterday that said he was Egyptian.
I have read about this plane crash on Antiwar.com, it was reported it was the pilot that was the Jihadi.
If the above story is true, maybe this "quite well educated man, befriended some of the pilots to get specific info, of who was going to be on the plane etc etc.
The terror organisations in Egypt are anti government, so nothing would please them more than to take out military or diplomats.
If he had been involved in the destruction of the EgyptAir flight, he would have known about far more strategic places to attack. He has to have known that what he set out to do could only add to El Al's reputation without doing it any damage.
My bet is that he was pissed about something, got some cheap s**t from a young female representing the Israelis, and went off the deep end. Again, just think of the damage he might have done with a much better planned attack. What he did makes sense from the etrrorist perspective only if he was meant to be a diversion.
Egypt Air flight 990 went down on October 31, 1999 and killed 217 people. It took off from JFK and was going to Cairo, Egypt. I have never heard of a flight 990 that went down in '91.
This isn't exactly new. The point was that they were western-friendly airforce officers. They cleaned out a bunch of anti-jihadists in one swoop.
Nothing like a little assassination game for our friendly Egyptians. They're old hands at it.
Yeah, but he WASN'T between the ages of 18-40 (he was 41). So there. ALL of you right-wing stereotypers are wrong, wrong, wrong, ALL of the time. /sarcasm
Someone goofed. Bad proofreading, perhaps. The report referred (two years ago) was about the 1999 crash.
"Hadayat is also believed to have abetted a previous, contrived airline disaster: On October 31, 1999, an Egyptair Boeing 767 Flight 990, which also took..."
Are you kidding? Only extreme professionalism of the El-Al guards saved the day. This had the potential of being a MAJOR bloodbath. Everybody admits that!
One of the perp's weapons was a .40 Glock with extra magazines.
My question: If the perp was a lone wolf how did he as an alien manage to get his hands on two handguns?
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