CAIRO, NOV 18: Family, friends and colleagues of EgyptAir co-pilot Gamil al-Batoti rushed to his defence on Wednesday, angered at reports suggesting he deliberately crashed flight 990 in an act of suicide.Tamar Hegazi and other relatives were upset and angry at reports that Batoti, one of flight 990's co-pilots, had financial problems and had become "withdrawn," shortly before the October 31 crash. "We're trying to find out who put forward Batoti's name because we won't stay quiet," Hegazi, a cousin of Batoti said as other relatives threatened court action for defamation.US media have reported information leaked from the investigation 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. No motive for the suspected suicide plunge was given by investigators, surprised at religious remarks from the recovered voice recorder and manoeuvers carried out by the crew without signs of a mechanical failure."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 a seriously ill daughter, aged about eight, who had been receiving treatment by 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 that before leaving for the US, 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." Batoti, who had made a pilgrimage to Mecca on his own, had planned to take all the family to Mecca after the New York-Cairo flight, she said.A relative revealed that Batoti was looking forward to retiring next year to run a flower nursery he had set up with a friend and in which he had invested 150,000 Egyptian pounds. A family friend of Gamil Batoti's, Inas Issa said she had bumped into him in New York's Pennsylvania Hotel about 10 days before the fatal crash. "I saw him in the elevator when we were going up and he was very, very natural as he was whenever I met him. I didn't speak to him but I didn't feel there was anything unusual about him," said Issa, the wife of Hesham Faruk, another of the eight pilots aboard the doomed plane.Egypt's pro-government Al-Ahram newspaper also tried to knock down speculation that the pilot deliberately crashed the plane. In an interview with the paper, Batoti's son Mohammed explained that a sum of money his father sent home the day before the crash was intended to pay off a telephone bill which was due.Batoti had trained more than 500 pilots for EgyptAir and other airlines and clocked up 12,538 flying hours, according to the secretary general of Egypt's pilots' Union, Ali Murad. EgyptAir officials have defended all flight crewmen aboard the doomed airliner, including Batoti, as top professionals. One official dismissed the religious remarks attributed to him as normal for a Muslim faced with danger.
