FBI agents have arrived in Cairo with a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) team to work with EgyptAir officials to investigate the training and personnel records of crew members of Flight 990, a US embassy source said in Cairo yesterday.
Meanwhile, Egypt's Transport Minister, Mr Ibrahim Demiri, told a parliamentary committee that it might take a long time to find out why EgyptAir Flight 990 had crashed, but the truth would eventually emerge.
The chairman of EgyptAir, Mr Mohammed Fahim Rayan, told the committee an International Civil Aviation Organisation inspection in March had "placed Egypt in the ranks of the leading countries in [aircraft] maintenance and care for pilots".
The EgyptAir Boeing 767 plunged into the sea off Massachusetts on October 31st, killing all 217 people on board.
Egypt has been angered by media speculation, based partly on words attributed to one of the pilots that suggested he had deliberately set the airliner on a suicidal dive. A US official said last Friday that a closer hearing of the cockpit recorder revealed no such utterance.
The US press, however, continues to run reports about the suicide theory. Newsweek said yesterday that the aircraft's co-pilot, Mr Gamil al-Batoti, had repeated 14 times the phrase "I put my trust in God" just before and just after the plane went into a nosedive.
The magazine cited unidentified government sources and sources close to the investigation as saying that that the phrase Tawakilt ala Allah, or "I put my trust in God", can be heard repeatedly on the tape, spoken by a voice believed to be that of Mr al-Batoti.
"The frequency and the way the invocation was made did not indicate that he was using it as part of everyday speech," Newsweek quoted a senior law enforcement official as saying.
The NTSB last week delayed a decision to transfer the investigation to the FBI, which would have indicated that a criminal act caused the tragedy. Mr Demiri said a contact by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt with President Clinton had "changed the direction of the investigation" but did not elaborate.
A Cairo newspaper said yesterday that damage to the tailpiece of the EgyptAir aircraft could have caused the crash. "Aviation experts said the likely cause of the plane's fall is direct damage to the tailpiece," the state-owned al-Gomhuria said. Investigators say the tailpiece broke off from the airliner during its dive.
Al-Gomhuria, which did not identify the experts, quoted one as saying the aircraft's transponder, which relays information about flights in progress to air traffic controllers, "perhaps stopped operating because the plane had been damaged".