THE CIA has asked Israel to check the Athens New York passenger list of the TWA airliner that later crashed, for people with links to "terror groups, an Israeli newspaper said yesterday.
The Paris bound Boeing 747 burst into a ball of fire shortly after take off from New York's Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday. It had flown into New York from Athens. All 230 Pep, plc aboard were killed.
The American intelligence agency gave Israel's Mossad (secret service) the passenger list of the TWA plane from Athens to New York and asked that it check the passengers backgrounds to reveal if one of them had connections to a terror group," Israel's largest selling daily, Yediatli Ahranoth, said.
The unsourced report said the Central Intelligence Agency made the same request of Jordan and. Egypt.
Israeli officials in Jerusalem were not immediately available for comment. Israeli security sources would neither confirm nor deny the report but one said: "There is co operation."
US investigators said on Sunday that without finding additional wreckage they would not be able to say conclusively if TWA Flight 800 was downed by an act of sabotage.
On Friday, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper quoted an unidentified senior security source as saying Israel was helping US intelligence agencies and the FBI in the investigation.
Investigators yesterday hoped improved weather and new high tech equipment would help them find clues to the crash in the fifth day of the search.
The slow pace of the search has infuriated grieving families. Only 46 of the people who died in Wednesday night's crash off the coast of Long Island, New York, have been recovered and identified.
The families attended a memorial service yesterday at a beach near where the crash occurred.
Investigators say only 1 per cent of the plane has been recovered. Unless they recover additional bodies and wreckage and the evidence they contain, they say they will not be able to state conclusively what caused the crash.
Critical to determining the cause of the crash is retrieval of the plane's "black box" voice and flight data recorders and larger pieces of wreckage. But so far, the electronic "ping" emitted by the boxes has been elusive.
Investigators were bringing in an undersea electronic robot to help with the search.