Egypt demands new details on EgyptAir plane crash

Egypt's Minister of Transport Ibrahim El-Demeiri is not dismissing the possibility that electromagnetic waves could have confused the computer of EgyptAir Flight 990, and thus led to its crash off the US east coast last October.

Commenting on what an American magazine, the New York Review of Books, said on Friday in this regard, Dr. Demeiri, however, believed that the theory was speculative.

In statements during an inspection tour of the first stage of a project securing the Cairo Air Navigation Centre, on Saturday, the Minister of Transport said Egypt still demands completion of information on the doomed plane's tail group and radar pictures.

Pilot Waleed Murad, head of the Egyptian Aviators Association, believes that the theory of electromagnetic frequencies interfering with the EgyptAir plane's steering systems, should be fully investigated.

It is possible that the auto pilot computer was jammed by strong radar waves which caused it to give wrong operation orders, Murad said.

But, like minister Demeiri, Murad insisted on access to the radar pictures to verify suspicions involving the existence of missile-like objects around the plane shortly before it crashed.

Joining this new assumption , is Air Vice-Marshal Mamdouh El-Bagouri, who embraced the theory from a scientific perspective, and said it was worthy of a thorough probe.

The New York Review of Books report consigns to the dustbin the theory that co-pilot Gameel E1 Battouti purposely downed the plane single-handedly in a reckless act of suicide, an official source at EgyptAir Operations Sector said.