



Egyptians Suffer Second Air Tragedy in a Year 

 CAIRO, Egypt   -- The crash of a Gulf Air flight that killed 143 people in Bahrain is a disturbing deja vu for Egyptians: It is the second plane crash within a year to devastate this Arab country.
   Sixty-three Egyptians were on board the Airbus A320, which crashed into shallow Persian Gulf waters Wednesday night after circling and trying to land in Bahrain.
   On Oct. 31, 1999, a plane carrying 217 mostly Egyptian passengers crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Massachusetts.
 The cause has not been determined, providing no closure to the families, whose grief was reopened this month with the release of a factual report by the National Transportation Safety Board.
   Walid Mourad, head of the Egyptian Pilots Association and a voice often heard in relation to the EgyptAir investigation, said Wednesday's crash is a tragedy for the Arab people as a whole.
   "We are all family and brothers. 
 We all have something in this," Mourad said. 
 "But for the Egyptians, this is a double blow. 
Two disasters in a row for the Egyptians."
   Many of the passengers on the Gulf Air flight were headed for jobs in Bahrain or elsewhere in the Gulf.
   Rida Hassan was one of those escaping Egypt's moribund economy for work in the oil-rich Gulf. 
Hassan's uncle said he rushed to the Cairo airport after hearing a list of the passengers read on television.
   The uncle, who would not give his name, said his nephew had come home to get married and stayed only a month. 
Hassan worked in a restaurant in Bahrain, his uncle said before disappearing into a room at the airport set aside for relatives desperate for news.
   In the hours just after the crash, relatives at the Cairo airport expressed anger and frustration at Gulf Air for the slow release of information. 
Women screamed and men tried vainly to calm them.
   "No information is being given to us. 
Absolutely nothing," Mohammed Ibrahim el-Naggar said hours after the crash. 
"We were told that there were some survivors but no names were given."
   El-Naggar said his cousin, her husband who works in Dubai, and their two children aged 2 and 3 were on the downed plane.
   Gulf Air said it was sending a special plane to carry 134 relatives to Manama airport later Thursday.
   "All necessary measures have been taken to receive the families of the victims," Mohammed al-Sayed Abbas, the Egyptian ambassador to Bahrain, told Egyptian television. 
"The embassy staff will be with them step by step until they identify the deceased."
   In Bahrain, relatives were beginning the wrenching process of identifying the victims from photographs taken after the bodies were retrieved from the Gulf.
   Egypt, which lacks the oil wealth of the Gulf and has an economy struggling to revive from decades of socialist stagnation, has a long tradition of sending workers to the Gulf to fill everything from skilled to menial jobs.
 Remittances from citizens working abroad make up Egypt's biggest source of foreign exchange.



