Cairo Airport a Chaotic Scene of Tears, Anger

By JOHN DANISZEWSKI

Nov. 1, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CAIRO — Hanafi Abdel Fattah, drawn and exhausted, his eyes red from crying, sat slumped in a dirty plastic chair in a dingy airport room on a polluted day in Cairo and pondered the cruelty of fate that had taken his daughter.

Twenty-year-old Walaa, a popular student nearing graduation in commerce from Cairo’s Ain Shams University, had been on her way back from an exciting 2 1/2 months staying with her aunt in California.

“It was her first trip abroad--a chance to know her cousins,” Abdel Fattah said.

The 52-year-old employee of Egypt’s largest building contracting company had made his daughter’s return reservation himself for Thursday. But when Walaa checked with EgyptAir in the United States, she was told she would have to fly Saturday instead because the original flight was too crowded.

Her aunt dropped her off at LAX, and then phoned Abdel Fattah in Egypt to say that the plane was late but he was “not to worry.”

Abdel Fattah said dozens of her friends and colleagues from the university had planned to greet Walaa at the airport. But instead of a party, the wait was transformed into a vigil Sunday as news spread that the plane she was on, EgyptAir Flight 990 from Los Angeles and New York, had plunged into the Atlantic Ocean about 40 minutes after taking off in New York.

There was little in the way of information or comfort at Cairo International Airport for Abdel Fattah and the loved ones of the 60 or so other Egyptians among the 217 people on board the doomed aircraft.

A walk through the abnormally solemn terminal, up two grimy flights of stairs, brought the anxious relatives to the room set aside as the “information center.”

There, behind a wooden table, sat three blue-suited EgyptAir employees, clutching a crinkled and barely legible fax list of the passengers. Periodically, family members walking as if in a daze would appear, bend over the list intently and then wail in grief or anger.

Bottles of mineral water and a rank of blue-garbed nurses with sedatives and an oxygen tank stood by to help the most distraught.

“Why, God? Why?!” cried one man inconsolably, his voice echoing through the stairwell.

The EgyptAir employees would not confirm to the relatives that the plane had crashed, insisting that they had no information. That, in turn, enraged some of the relatives, some of whom cursed EgyptAir and its president, Mohammed Fahin Rayan.

“How can you not know what happened from dawn until now? My God, I will shoot Rayan,” screamed Sohair Hassan, who said her sister and brother-in-law were on the flight. “I won’t care what will happen to me.”

There were other scenes of tears and flailing fists. One man kicked a news photographer. Another crumpled to the floor and had to be revived with oxygen. From a corner in the far reaches of the room, an older man kept moaning, “Ahmad, Ahmad. . . . My son, my son.”

“None of the officials will tell us anything,” complained Samiha Ismail, seeking news about her brother-in-law, who had lived in the United States for 20 years and carried an American passport. He had five children, the oldest 11. “We accept God’s will. We just want to know.”

Mazen Nur Din, public relations manager of the Tenth of Ramadan Co. for Glass Products, was waiting as he always did to meet the company’s founder and owner, Magdy Greiche, 50, a frequent traveler to the United States who was scheduled to be aboard Flight 990.

“He is responsible for 1,500 people as well as his family--two little children,” Din said. “We hope in God” that he is still alive.

Between stints talking to relatives, EgyptAir personnel quietly expressed their own sense of astonishment at the crash, and their sense of loss regarding the crew members aboard the flight.

“Until we get to the bottom of the sea and look, nobody can know what happened,” said one senior official.

Rumors immediately began to circulate in Cairo that there was a connection between the crash of Flight 990 and other crashes in the same general vicinity of TWA and Swissair passenger jets.

“Maybe this is some kind of dangerous area,” said one EgyptAir employee.

The airline has offered to take one member of each victim’s family to New York on a special flight Tuesday, which is also to carry officials of the airline to discuss the plane’s fate with American investigators.

Also, the Egyptian government pledged to pay a still-unspecified sum in death benefits to each of the Egyptian victims’ families.

Rayan, the EgyptAir president, said he was confident that U.S. authorities will eventually pinpoint the reason for the crash, but he indicated that he did not think the airline’s personnel or its Boeing 767--a 10-year-old aircraft equipped for long-range flights--could be at fault.

“We have proof that our plane was OK and the pilots were good and well-trained,” Rayan told an Egyptian television interviewer. “We have crossed the Atlantic 1,000 times.”

If EgyptAir ultimately is shown to have committed “shortcomings,” Rayan hinted that he would be “the first to pay,” by resigning.

Some Egyptians tended to agree with Rayan’s defense of the national carrier, insisting that EgyptAir is a reliable airline with a proven record of safety.

“I have traveled many times on the same route, and it is the best. The pilots are very, very good, and the model plane was the most modern,” said a young businessman, Mohammed Ezz.

But for grieving relatives, there were no easy answers. Abdel Fattah, lingering in the airport for some word of his daughter, said he was not sure after more than five hours when he might depart.

Whenever he did, he said, he would have to confront the grief of Walaa’s mother and younger sister, and he was not ready for that.

“I cannot face seeing them,” he said.

Aline Kazandjian of The Times’ Cairo bureau contributed to this story.