Posted on 07/06/2002 8:21:02 AM PDT by HAL9000
CAIRO, July 6 (AFP) - The family of the Egyptian gunman believed to have opened fire on an El Al check-in counter in Los Angeles airport said Saturday that financial problems with the Israeli airline could be behind the incident."Egyptian security services affirmed Friday to the father of (suspected gunman) Hisham Mohammed Hadayet that the incident was due to financial problems with El Al," cousin Emad al-Omda told AFP.
Al-Omda said that the Israeli airline had been late in paying for two limousines that it had rented from Hadayet's service.
"We are sure that he had no connection with extremist organisations. He is a pious Muslim but he is not at all extremist. The proof of this is that he agreed to work with the Israeli company El Al," Omda said.
On Thursday, Hadayet opened fire at the check-in counter of Israel's national airline El Al killing a female clerk and a middle-aged man, before being shot dead himself by an El Al security agent, the FBI said.
Al-Omda said that Hadayet went to the United States in 1992 "to improve his level of life" and hoped to obtain US nationality with the help of his paternal uncle, physical therapist Ahmed Hadayet, a longtime resident of the United States.
"His uncle helped him to work and to take the green card after his arrival in 1992 and he was supposed to have taken US nationality this year," said Omda, a businessman in the city of Tanta north of Cairo.
The family has not been able to contact Hadayet's uncle in the United States. "We have tried to call him to find out more about the incident but his mobile phone did not answer yesterday," Omda said.
Washington and US law enforcement officials were leery of putting a terror label on the incident just yet.
"There is no evidence, no indication at this time, that this is terrorists," White spokesman Ari Fleischer said Friday.
Fleicher's comments were later echoed by an FBI spokesman who said investigators had not uncovered anything to suggest that the man, 41-year-old Hadayet, had any connection to terrorist groups or harbored anti-Israel views.
Hadayet was not on file with the Egyptian security services, a police source told AFP without specifying further.
Married and the father of two boys, age 12 and 6, Hadayet, who obtained a degree in commerce from Cairo's Ain Shams university, comes from a middle class Egyptian family containing several senior officers in the armed forces.
His father, Mohammed Ali Hadayet, was a former brigadier in the Egyptian air defense who participated in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, members of his family said.
The late Salah Hadayet, a cousin of his father, was a former Minister of Scientific Research and a member of the Free Officers movement which overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952.
Hadayet's family wants to bury him in Cairo.
"We are in contact with the ministry of foreign Affairs to recover his body but we want first that the truth is established because we are sure that he could not be a murderer," Omda added.
Police continue to block access to the family's home in a six-storey apartment building in the Cairo neighborhood of Abbasiya, an AFP correspondent said.
However, relatives and neighbors have been allowed to enter to present condolences to Hadayet's father and mother.
You know, kill a couple of their customers..
The desperate defense of this guy by the media is astounding..
sheesh
OKC Bombing
Flight 800
Egypt Air
What true believing Muslim would die to give more force to the myth of El Al invinsibility? As a limo driver in LA, this guy knew where there were far better Jewish targets, Jewish weddings, graduation parties, bar mitzvahs or movie industry get togethers, for example.
I don't know which of you profits by the "terrorists did it" position or why. I am happy to "call" it terrorism because such an act has to help the Republicans in November but, it could be counterproductive if we yell "terrorist" today and find out tomorrow that it was just an invoice 120 days past due.
For example El Al is _Israel's_ airline. He wanted to strike directly against Israel on US soil.
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