ARAB-US RELATIONS - Jan. 20 - Investigators Believe EgyptAir Crash Was Deliberate.

Sources say investigators examining the debris from EgyptAir Flight 990 still believe the Boeing 767 was deliberately crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 217 people aboard. Officials at the National Transportation Safety Board are tight-lipped, saying investigators had not determined the cause of the Oct. 31 crash off the coast of Massachusetts. But they acknowledge that investigators had not seen any signs of mechanical failure that would have explained the airliner's sudden dive into the sea less than an hour after taking off from New York to Cairo. NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway says: "We have not determined the cause of this accident", adding, "We have said before that we have not seen any signs of mechanical failure, but that does not rule it out completely". Another spokesman for the NTSB, Ted Lapatkowicz, says there were no plans to reconstruct the aircraft, as investigators did in the case of TWA Flight 800, which exploded shortly after take-off from New York's John F. Kennedy airport on July 17, 1996. Lapatkowicz says: "There are no such plans right now". Experts say the lack of plans to reconstruct the aircraft further underscored the fact that investigators believed the crash was deliberately caused by someone at the airplane's controls. One source, who has talked with investigators working on the accident, says their thinking had not changed. The source says: "A deliberate downing of the aircraft by a crewmember is still the best explanation of the evidence uncovered to date". Officials say FBI bomb technicians and experts, along with Egyptian investigators, have continued to sift through the recovered wreckage of EgyptAir Flight 990 since December, when a salvage ship recovered about 70% of the aircraft from an area about 96 kms south of Martha's Vineyard. (The NTSB in November considered handing leadership of the probe to the FBI as a criminal matter because of signs a crew member may have deliberately downed the plane, but backed off after Egyptian government protests. In December, the safety board said video of the submerged engine taken by the US Navy suggested little or no thrust being produced at the time of impact with the water. It said: "This would be consistent with flight data recorder information that the engines were shut off during the crash sequence".)