Freeh Wants To End Probe Of Flight 800 Fbi Chief Says Evidence Points To Mechanical Failure
Stopping just short of ruling out sabotage as the cause of the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, FBI Director Louis Freeh said Sunday that the evidence in the case points to a “catastrophic mechanical failure” and emphasized the need to draw the criminal inquiry to a close.
Freeh’s comments sent the strongest signal yet that the FBI is moving toward abandoning its search for clues to a possible crime in the July 17, 1996, midair explosion of the Boeing 747 off Long Island, N.Y., which killed 230 people.
“I think that the evidence as we’ve developed it to date, and particularly the evidence which we have not found, would lead the inquiry toward the conclusion that this was a catastrophic mechanical failure,” he said on the NBC television program “Meet the Press.”
Freeh said criminal investigators have not made a final determination about the cause of the crash but said that “we need to get a conclusion.”
He added: “We have to get some closure as to this case. But the evidence is certainly not moving in the direction of a terrorist act. It is, in fact, moving in the other direction.”
Freeh’s comments echo what has been said in recent days by James Kallstrom, the assistant FBI director in New York who is heading the criminal inquiry.
But Freeh, who rarely speaks publicly about FBI cases, has been much more circumspect about the direction of the investigation when asked about it previously.
Over the last few days, Kallstrom also has been more forthcoming in signaling the end of the FBI’s inquiry, saying criminal investigators are in the last stages of their work and have not found any evidence of sabotage.
The comments of both officials seem intended to prepare the public for the final step in an extraodinary turnabout for many investigators: from near-certainty of terrorism immediately after the crash to the conclusion that a rare and as yet unidentified mechancial failure caused the plane to explode.
Kallstrom was not available for comment Sunday, but his spokesman, Joseph Valiquette, said that since no evidence of a crime has been found in 10 months, “logic would demand that we look more toward the mechanical.”
On the hot, humid night last summer, however, the explosion that split the plane apart just after it had left New York’s Kennedy International Airport for Paris seemed eerily reminiscent of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and it seemed inconceivable that the explosion could have been an accident.
The FBI investigation once involved about 500 agents around the world, examining wreckage of the plane for forensic evidence of a blast, tracking terrorists and examining the lives of each of the victims in search of possible motives for a mass murder.
Now, there are about 50 agents still working on the case. Most of them are conducting a final examination of the 90-foot portion of the plane’s fuselage, which has been reconstructed, in search of any evidence of a missile or bomb. Others are working to explain the accounts of more than 100 witnesses who said they had seen lights streaking toward the plane before it exploded, which gave credence to the theory that a missile had hit the plane.
FBI officials said it still could take as long as 90 days before their work is completed.
If the FBI does formally end its investigation, it will leave the job of determining the crash’s cause to the National Transportation Safety Board, which always has headed the inquiry.
Board engineers have determined that the plane’s huge center fuel tank exploded after filling with fuel vapors. And in December, board officials issued recommendations to guard against a similar situation occurring in another plane. But the engineers still have not been able to determine what ignited the fumes.
On Sunday, Peter Goelz, a safety board spokesman, said he concurs with Freeh’s remarks that there is no evidence of sabotage.