The family of the Egyptian gunman, who went on a shooting spree at the LA airport’s El Al ticketing counter, said Saturday they believed he was motivated by financial problems with the Israeli airline, and not by politics or terrorism.
In the first official Egyptian reaction to the shooting, Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher also said he believed Hisham Mohammed Hadayet, who killed two people before he was gunned down, was carrying out a personal grudge.
”Egyptian security services on Friday told the father of Hisham Mohammed Hadayet the incident was due to financial problems with El Al,” one of his cousins, Emad al-Omda, told neighbourhood.
Omda claimed the Israeli airline had been late in paying for two limousine rentals from the Egyptian immigrant’s company.
”We are sure that he had no connection with extremist organisations. He is a pious Muslim but he is not at all extremist. The proof of this is that he agreed to work with the Israeli company El Al,” Omda said.
Maher also said he was sceptical the July 4 Independence Day shooting was a terrorist attack.
”No one has suggested that this disaster was caused by a specific reason other than a personal one,” the foreign minister said.
”No one knows the motives for the incident yet. It is necessary to wait for the (result of) investigations before it is possible to comment on it,” Maher said, saying he was ”surprised by the amplification of this incident.”
On Thursday, the 41-year-old Hadayet approached the El Al ticketing counter at Los Angeles International Airport and killed a young ticketing clerk and another Israeli-born American who was seeing off friends before he was shot down by a crack security agent.
Since then, there have been questions about whether Hadayet acted alone or was a terrorist agent.
Israel, which is mired in a bloody conflict with the Palestinian people, insist it was an assault against the Jewish state.
The family of the ticketing clerk killed has slammed the US government for not classifying the killings as a terror attack, while a leading Jewish group also branded the rampage as anti-Israeli terrorism.
However, law enforcement agents in the United States, which has been on a heightened alert following September’s terror attacks on US targets by Islamic extremists, and even the White House have said they have no firm indication it was a terror strike.
An Egyptian police source also said on Saturday that Hadayet was not on file with the national security services.
His cousin Omda said Hadayet went to the United States in 1992 ”to improve his level of life” and hoped to obtain US nationality with the help of his paternal uncle, physical therapist Ahmed Hadayet, a longtime US resident.
”His uncle helped him to work and to take the green card after his arrival in 1992 and he was supposed to have taken US nationality this year,” said Omda, a businessman in the city of Tanta north of Cairo.
The family has not been able to contact Hadayet’s uncle in the United States. ”We have tried to call him to find out more about the incident but his mobile phone did not answer yesterday,” Omda said.
Married and the father of two boys, ages 12 and 6, Hadayet, who obtained a degree in commerce from Cairo’s Ain Shams university, comes from a middle class Egyptian family with several senior officers in the armed forces.
His father, Mohammed Ali Hadayet, was a former air brigadier who fought in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, his family said. The late Salah Hadayet, a cousin of his father, was a former minister of scientific research and a member of the Free Officers movement which overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952.
Meanwhile, Hadayet’s family said they wanted to bury him in Cairo. ”We are in contact with the ministry of foreign affairs to recover his body but we want first that the truth be established because we are sure that he could not be a murderer,” Omda said.
Police also continue to block access to the family’s home in a six-storey apartment building in Abbasiya. – Sapa-AFP