FBI MAY TAKE OVER INVESTIGATION OF EGYPTAIR 990 CRASH.

Byline: Matthew L. Wald and David Johnston The New York Times

Government officials said Monday evening that the National Transportation Safety Board was considering asking the FBI to take over the case of EgyptAir 990, after a review of the plane's cockpit voice recorder.

The officials said they were focusing on a cryptic utterance, possibly a prayer. They said there were many questions about exactly what was said and what it meant, but they were concerned that the statement might be the last words of a pilot determined to destroy himself and the airplane.

The plane crashed in the Atlantic, near Nantucket Island, Mass., two weeks ago, killing all 217 people on board.

Officials would not characterize the words beyond saying that they may have been a prayer. The crew's conversations, other than uneventful ones with air traffic controllers, were in Arabic, and senior officials of the safety board said that even with the aid of additional interpreters brought in Monday, they did not understand what was being said on the tape. The problems were ones of language, culture and hearing what people said in a noisy cockpit.

Transportation investigators also stressed that they had not yet synchronized the voice tape with the flight data recorder tape, which would record events occurring on the airplane and could put the statements in context. For instance, a prayer being said after the plane began plummeting so fast that passengers were rendered weightless would not be suspicious.

But a senior law enforcement official said Monday night he believed that the tape showed that after one of the two pilots left the cockpit, another crew member made the suspicious utterance. Only after that, the law-enforcement official said, was the autopilot disengaged, seconds before the plane began its fatal plunge. That sequence of events cast suspicion on the crew member, he said.

CBS News reported, meanwhile, that the system recorded what sounded like the cockpit door opening and a voice saying something to the effect of ``what's going on?''

The safety board has supreme authority over transportation accidents and guards that role jealously, but the FBI, which usually assists the board, takes over if the two agencies decide that there was evidence of a crime.

The chairman of the safety board, Jim Hall, at a news conference Monday afternoon, said, ``We are concentrating our efforts on determining from the evidence, including the cockpit voice recorder, whether or not this investigation is to remain under the leadership of the NTSB.''

Asked to clarify why he was focusing on whether the crash was properly within his agency's jurisdiction, Hall simply reread his statement about leadership of the investigation.

Government officials said that the safety board proposed stepping aside Monday afternoon, and taking a subordinate role assisting the FBI, but FBI officials said they first wanted to study the tape more.

The FBI, which had one agent sitting in with safety board officials on Sunday to listen to the tape, sent more Monday evening, officials said.

The board is often eager to extricate itself from crashes that are not caused by mechanical failures or human error; most recently, it gave the FBI jurisdiction over the derailment of an Amtrak train in October 1995, near Hyder, Ariz., that was determined to have been caused by someone sabotaging the tracks. It has also turned over two aircraft incidents, in which disgruntled airline employees came into the cockpit and attacked the pilots flying the plane.

And board officials say they have a full agenda of work, including the TWA 800 crash three years ago, which was initially suspected to be sabotage but is now believed to have been caused by mechanical failure.

Officials would not say how many voices were heard on the tape. The cockpit requires a crew of two, and has two seats where observers, trainees or company employees along for the ride can sit.