DEBKAfile’s Counter-Terror Sources:
Hadayat Belonged to Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda’s Operational Arm
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 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, 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 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 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 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.
Send mail to webmaster@theppsc.org with questions or comments about this web site.
©2004 The Police Policy Studies Council. All rights reserved. A Steve Casey design.
|