Family, friends and colleagues of EgyptAir co-pilot Gamil al-Batoti rushed to his defense on Wednesday angered at reports suggesting he deliberately crashed flight 990 in an act of suicide.Tamar Hegazi and other relatives were upset at reports that Batoti, one of flight 990's co-pilots, had financial problems and had become ``withdrawn''. ``We're trying to find out who put forward Batoti's name because we won't stay quiet,'' Hegazi, a cousin of Batoti, told AFP as other relatives threatened court action for defamation.US media have reported that Batoti might have wanted to crash the plane in a suicide act, but it is not clear yet whether he was in the co-pilot's seat when the Boeing 767 plunged into the Atlantic with 217 people aboard. ``If he committed suicide, why would he say the verses of the Koran? A person who commits suicide loses his religion,'' Batoti's nephew Walid told the US television network ABC, speaking from Cairo.The Washington Post said on Wednesday that the EgyptAir employee had aseriously ill daughter, aged about eight, who had been receiving treatment from a rheumatologist at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Batoti's wife Umaima al-Dahi, interviewed by the Egyptian government daily Al-Gomhuriya said her husband had assured her ``there was great hope of a cure'' for their daughter Aya when he phoned home before flying to Cairo. She said the couple had planned soon to accompany their daughter to Los Angeles. Family members said the girl was suffering from lupus, an immune disorder.Dahi rejected rumors that her husband might have been depressed, saying he had organised a party for his son Mohammed's graduation from police school. ``Who could believe that my husband.could have committed suicide?'' she told Gomhuriya. ``He was very happy.'' A man who spoke to AFP from the family home also dismissed speculation that Batoti's family was suffering financial burden due to the daughter's treatment. The man, who said he was a relative but asked not to be named, threatened a suitand claimed Batoti was looking forward to retiring and to run a flower nursery in which he had invested above $40,000.A family friend of Batoti's, Inas Issa, said she had bumped into the pilot in New York's Pennsylvania Hotel about 10 days before the crash. ``He was very, very natural, as he was whenever I met him. I didn't speak to him but.there was anything unusual about him,'' said Issa, the wife of Hesham Faruk, another of the eight pilots aboard the doomed plane.New flight numberEgyptAir has changed the number of its Cairo-New York-Los Angeles service in the wake of last month's crash of flight 990. The outward flight from Cairo will now bear the number 983 and the return leg 984, an operations official at Cairo airport said, adding the change had been made for ``psychological reasons''. ``We must appreciate that some people are superstitious,'' the official noted.
