Intelligence Confirms: Arab Egyptian Was An Islamic Jihad
by DEBKAfile
5 July 2002
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 DEBKAfiles 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, 1999, an Egyptair Boeing 767 Flight 990, which also took off
from Los Angeles airport for Kennedy, New York. After Kennedy, the plane bound
for Cairo 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 copilots
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 Egypts 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 boards 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.
Hadayats murderous attack on El Al flight 106 passengers points back to
the Egyptair 990 disaster of 1999, 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 Qaedas 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.
DEBKAfiles Middle East intelligence sources report that early Friday,
Egyptian intelligence officers picked up Hadayats relatives and associates
in Cairo, to try and trace the identities of his fellows in the American Jihad
cell.