January 03, 2004

141 feared dead in plane crash near Sharm el-Sheikh

A charter airliner with 141 people aboard - most of them French tourists - crashed into the Red Sea shortly after takeoff early Saturday from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, according to officials who feared no one had survived.

The Boeing 737 jet took off shortly before 5 a.m. local time (0300 GMT) and quickly disappeared from radar about 7 miles (11 kilometers) south of the airport, said airport officials using customary anonymity. There was no distress made, according officials at Egypt's Ministry of Civil Aviation.

The crash occurred amid a week of heightened concerns about terrorist threats from the air that have led to increased security and canceled flights around the world.

But an initial statement from aviation ministry ruled out terrorism, calling the crash an "accident" that may have been caused by a mechanical problem. The ministry said no one was believed to have survived.
[...]
The weather was clear in Sharm el-Sheikh and other flights were taking off without incident, officials said.

Sharm el-Sheik is a popular Red Sea tourist resort that also frequently hosts major political and economic summits. Egypt has held several meetings on peace in the Middle East there, including one in which US President George W. Bush met with regional leaders in June over the "road map" plan toward creating a Palestinian state.

Local news media reported Saturday that vacationing Prime Minister Tony Blair from Britain was to meet there later in the day with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Hmmm. Interesting...
While the Egyptian "officials" may not think this was terrorism, I'm not so sure.
The French are a target because well, they're French, and Chirac didn't endear himself to the Islamists lately with the recent headscarf ban in France.
And Egypt's popularity has been dropping in the Arab world, at least the Paleostinian part of it, with his urging of late to his brother Muslims to become more moderate and to go with the Western flow.
(His most recent efforts have been an attempt to negotiate a ceasefire between the Palis and the Israelis.)
Now that I've learned that Tony Blair, PM of the "Little Satan," was going to meet with Mubarrak in Sharm el-Sheik later today, it seems more and more that this airplane "accident" could very well have been caused by SAM fired from the shoulder of an Islamist, say a member of Islamic Jihad who make their home in Egypt.
Thirdly, most Western airports (both here in the US and in Europe) have been so locked down because of our terror alert, that the bad guys were forced to hit a "soft target" like this Egyptian tourist plane.
At this same time of year in 1988, I took a tour of Egypt and got on 2 intra-Egypt tourist flights: this could have been me. Yikes!
Well, God rest the souls of these poor departed.
Hopefully, they never even knew what hit them before they were gone.