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A terror group from Egypt told the FBI it was responsible for downing TWA Flight 800 and killing all 230 people aboard, according to newly surfaced FBI records featured in a new documentary marking the 30th anniversary of the tragedy.
An explosive claim buried in a trove of newly obtained Freedom of Information Act documents is reviving decades-old questions about whether a missile or bomb brought down the Boeing 747-100 off Long Island on July 17, 1996.
Among the records obtained by the transparency nonprofit Judicial Watch is a New York teletype dated two days after the crash, case file 265A-NY-259028: “FBI headquarters received faxes generated from Cairo claiming credit for the destruction of the aircraft,” the cable states.
The document does not name the terror group or otherwise provide an assessment by investigators at the time of the veracity of its claim to have brought down the jet. A 14-month FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force probe, along with a four-year National Transportation Safety Board investigation, ultimately rejected that theory.
But it’s existence is prompting a series of questions from Judicial Watch, which filed suit in federal court this week against the NTSB to get more information and whose findings will be featured in a new 45-minute documentary, “Judicial Watch Investigates TWA 800 – 30 Years Later,” which debuts Saturday on YouTube.
“Let’s see the faxes. Did you pursue it? To what degree? Was it a fraudster? Was it legitimate?” asked the group’s chief investigator, Chris Farrell, who has spent years trying to untangle the evidence.
“That’s pretty alarming considering there was a massive effort to swat that theory down back in ‘96,” he added. “Cairo at that point was a hotbed for all kinds of militant Islamist supremacists.”
TWA Flight 800 departed JFK International Airport in New York at 8:19 p.m., bound for Paris, and blew up 12 minutes after take off over the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches, New York.
All 18 crew and 212 passengers died instantly.
Another partially redacted line states that “one of the crew on board flight 800, working as a flight attendant was [redacted].” The reason for the redaction isn’t known but James Kallstrom, the FBI New York field office chief who was placed in charge of the probe, was close friends with a fellow FBI agent whose wife was a member of the crew on the doomed flight.
The NTSB determined after its investigation that the “probable cause” of the accident was “an explosion of the center wing fuel tank (CWT) resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank.”
The $40 million probe, which included painstakingly reassembling the aircraft from pieces recovered from the sea floor, couldn’t determine the source of ignition, but said the “most likely” culprit was a spark caused by a short circuit.
The FBI dropped its probe in 1997, with then-assistant FBI Director Kallstrom telling reporters: “Following 16 months of unprecedented investigation we must now report that no evidence has been found which would indicate that a criminal act was the cause.”
The documentary raises other questions about investigators’ conclusions, including why existing 747s were never grounded after the incident, and why no other 747s ever suffered a similar explosion in the succeeding years.
Another document obtained through one of the group’s 13 FOIA requests is a February 1997 internal FBI memo for briefing family members more than six months after the event that references the “three most likely theories” for the cause of the explosion – the bomb theory, the missile theory and mechanical failure.
“Despite a wealth of circumstantial evidence indicating that the aircraft was struck by a missile fired from a sea-borne platform, the exact cause of the explosion remains a mystery,” it states.
Numerous eyewitnesses said they saw streaks of light before the explosion. A CIA video simulation said witnesses were seeing burning, leaking fuel.
Also featured in the film is Dr. Tom Stalcup, a physicist who consulted on multiple lawsuits brought by family members of the passengers killed. He described identifying a piece of the fuselage with a curved end that he said indicated there was an external source of the explosion — and made the alarming claim that it had been bent back during the investigation. Numerous family members of victims settled with the airline and Boeing in the years following the crash, with some taking $2.5 million in compensation.
“The curl was gone, they flattened it like a pancake. And so they altered the evidence to make it like there was no internal damage caused by an external force,” Stalcup said in the documentary.
Asked to comment on Stalcup’s claims, the NTSB referenced its earlier report.
“The source of ignition energy for the explosion could not be determined with certainty, but, of the sources evaluated by the investigation, the most likely was a short circuit outside of the CWT that allowed excessive voltage to enter it through electrical wiring associated with the fuel quantity indication system,” it said.
“Contributing factors to the accident were the design and certification concept that fuel tank explosions could be prevented solely by precluding all ignition sources and the design and certification of the Boeing 747 with heat sources located beneath the CWT with no means to reduce the heat transferred into the CWT or to render the fuel vapor in the tank nonflammable.”
The Post has reached out to the FBI and CIA for comment.
Farrell refuses to accept the official explanation.
“I can tell you that the official explanation — this guess that a spark of unknown origin somehow ignited the center fuel tank is preposterous,” he said.
The group is hoping the documentary renews interest in the strange and tragic story, and prompts government agencies to hand over additional documents that might fill in still more details.
“They have not been forthcoming,” said Farrell.
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