US officials discount reports of people in Egyptair cockpit

However, the official said on Wednesday there is nothing else that would steer investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board away from their theory that a lone person in the cockpit turned off the autopilot, pointed the plane’s nose toward the Atlantic Ocean and then turned off the engines.

The safety board has already said there is no evidence that a mechanical or weather-related problem caused flight 990 to crash on October 31. All 217 aboard the New York-to-Cairo flight were killed.

Last week, an Egyptian weekly, Rose el Youssef, quoted sources who said that the voice recorder transcript contradicts earlier reports bolstering a pilot suicide theory.

The magazine said the first translations were made by Lebanese workers at the CIA, one of whom spoke broken Arabic. People from both countries speak Arabic, but the Lebanese accent is different from the Egyptian one, and Egyptians use certain phrases not used by the Lebanese.