AIR FRANCE CRASH: AHA! There was a strong terror link after all, reported by DEBKAFILE. Below. Not surprised at all. On the other hand, the Americans are not convinced, minimizing the connection. Who is right?

Two radical Muslims identified on crashed Air France flight

June 10, 2009, 9:40 PM (GMT+02:00)

First crash victims recovered

The day after DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources' revelation of Tuesday, June 9, that French security was going through the doomed Air France flight's passenger list for suspected terror links, the Paris weekly L'Express reported a link had been found.

French security DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) agents dispatched to Brazil identified two names on the passenger list which also appear also on highly-classified documents listing radical Muslims considered a threat to France. This link to the air tragedy was described as "highly significant."

The French agents also examined the security measures employed at Rio de Janeiro international port from which Air France A300 took off May 31 with 228 passengers and crew, never to arrive at its destination at Charles de Gaulle, Paris.

DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources report that in the last few months Paris has received several threats of an impending al Qaeda mega-attack against a French city on the lines of the hijacked airliners which struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. The jihadis were bent on punishing president Nicolas Sarkozy for posting fresh French troops to Afghanistan.

Should further investigations connect the two Muslim passengers to this conspiracy, it would go far to indicate that the Air France flight was destined to crash over Paris - except that the plan misfired and the plane came down sooner than planned over the Atlantic.

According to our sources, the French flight crews warned of the plot might have succeeded into pre-empting it by an extraordinary act of bravery to crash the plane in the ocean before it reached France.

Alternatively, the two purported terrorists may have been on a suicide operation like the Egyptian Airline pilot who brought his Boeing 767 into the Atlantic off the US coast on March 31, 1999.

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Despite recent unsourced reports, investigators downplay possibility of terrorism in the crash of Air France Flight 447.

Mark Hosenball

Newsweek Web Exclusive

U.S. officials are minimizing French media suggestions of possible terrorist involvement in the mid-Atlantic crash 10 days ago of Air France 447, which apparently fell out of the sky while heading into a patch of severe weather en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro.

The website of the French newsmagazine L'Express yesterday posted an unsourced item reporting that "French intelligence services" had discovered two names on the flight's passenger list that matched "those of people known for their link to Islamic terrorism." The story indicated that French investigators were unable to conclusively match the passenger names to the known terrorist suspects because they lacked the dates of birth of the passengers. The story acknowledged that it is possible that the passengers simply had names that were similar to those of terror suspects known to intelligence agencies.

Two U.S. officials familiar with the investigation into the flight's disappearance say that French authorities had shared the suspicious names from the airliner's passenger list with U.S. authorities, but that initial inquiries did not substantiate indications of any terror connection to the crash. One of the officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, says that the two passenger names which the French focused on were common Middle Eastern names that would be equivalent in the English-language world to names like "John Smith."

Because the names are so commonplace, and because there is no date-of-birth information to connect the passengers to any specific terrorist suspect who might be listed in French or other government intelligence databases, there is currently no serious foundation for suggesting that the listed passengers had real terror connections or that there is a serious basis for linking the plane's disappearance to terrorism, U.S. officials say. They say they believe that the French government itself plans to deny publicly that it has been able to make any substantive connection between the passenger names and known terror suspects.

French and U.S. officials both have said that they cannot completely rule out the possibility that the plane was brought down in mid-ocean by some kind of terror attack. However, officials say that there is no evidence, or even significant intelligence—apart from the Middle Eastern names on the passenger list—suggesting a link between the plane's disappearance and terrorism. News reports alleged that before flight 447 left Brazil for France, an Air France flight from Buenos Aires to France had received a bomb threat. However, investigators note that that threat was against a flight from Argentina, not Brazil; a knowledgeable U.S. official has also remarked that both domestic and international airline flights are frequently the targets of bomb threats, the overwhelming proportion of which turn out to be false alarms.

French and Brazilian recovery crews have begun to recover the bodies of passengers known to have been on Air France 447 and some airplane wreckage at a location in the South Atlantic near the spot where the plane's last known communications were transmitted. Investigators and Airbus, the manufacturer of the A-330 aircraft, also have acknowledged that before the plane's disappearance, its automated control systems sent out data messages to Air France's maintenance center indicating that the plane's airspeed sensors were producing inconsistent data.

Based on this limited information, investigators are focusing on a theory that the plane's airspeed sensor system, which includes parts known as "pitot tubes," might have gotten clogged with ice as the plane flew into heavy weather, thereby producing incoherent speed data, which led either the flight's human crew or its heavily computerized control systems to make wrong decisions about speeding up or slowing down the plane. Such misinformed decisions could have resulted in the plane charging too quickly into violent stormy winds, leading to extreme stress on the plane's frame, or at least theoretically to the plane flying too slowly to stay aloft.

While it still hasn't been completely ruled out as a possible cause, despite the suspicious names on the flight manifest, terrorism currently is regarded by most, if not all, official investigators as an unlikely cause of the crash.