Free Republic

Usama bin Laden may have gotten the idea for the 9/11 attacks after watching news coverage of the 1999 crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, in which a jihadist co-pilot caused the airliner to nosedive into the Atlantic, according to a first-hand account from one of the terror chief’s top lieutenants. Bin Laden wondered why the co-pilot in the deliberate crash did not fly the plane into buildings, Nasir al Wuhayshi said in the latest AQAP newsletter, in an account translated by the Long War Journal. Al Wuhayshi, former adviser to bin Laden and leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian...

In his first public comments on the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, the director of the F.B.I., Louis J. Freeh, said today that the Egyptian authorities were cooperating with the inquiry into the cause of the crash and would investigate a list of leads at the request of American law-enforcement officials. Mr. Freeh, speaking with reporters at the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the authorities in Cairo were assisting American investigators even though Egyptian officials have dismissed the principal American theory that a reserve pilot might have deliberately brought down the airliner. In a separate development, aviation...

'The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing will remain in jail while his appeal continues, a court has ruled. Lawyers for Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who has advanced prostate cancer, had asked the Appeal Court in Edinburgh to grant him interim liberation. The Libyan is appealing against his conviction for the murder of 270 people when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988. A full hearing is likely to take place in the middle of next year. The judgement on the bail application was delivered on Friday by the Lord Justice General Lord Hamilton, along with Lord Kingarth and...

March 16, 2002 EgyptAir Pilot Sought Revenge by Crashing, Co-Worker Said By MATTHEW L. WALD WASHINGTON, March 15 — A former EgyptAir pilot told American investigators two years ago that the co-pilot of EgyptAir 990 crashed the plane into the Atlantic Ocean to take revenge on a company executive who had just demoted him and was riding as a passenger, a person involved in the investigation said today. American aviation investigators say they do not know whether the explanation given by the pilot, which was first reported today in The Los Angeles Times, is true. Since the crash of the...

NewsMax reports: "Hayadet was a radical Muslim extremist involved in terrorism, the respected Israeli intelligence Web site DEBKA.com reported today. "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," DEBKA said....also believed to have abetted a previous, contrived airline disaster: On October 31, 1999, an Egyptair Boeing 767 Flight 990...copilot Gameel...