Two Fundamentalists Muslims linked to Air France Crash

Two radical Muslims identified on crashed Air France flight

DEBKAfile Special Report

June 10, 2009, 9:40 PM (GMT+02:00)
First crash victims recovered

First crash victims recovered

The day after DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources' revelation of Tuesday, June 9, that French security was going through the doomed Air France flight's passenger list for suspected terror links, the Paris weekly L'Express reported a link had been found.



French security DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) agents dispatched to Brazil identified two names on the passenger list which also appear also on highly-classified documents listing radical Muslims considered a threat to France. This link to the air tragedy was described as "highly significant."

The French agents also examined the security measures employed at Rio de Janeiro international port from which Air France A300 took off May 31 with 228 passengers and crew, never to arrive at its destination at Charles de Gaulle, Paris.

DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources report that in the last few months Paris has received several threats of an impending al Qaeda mega-attack against a French city on the lines of the hijacked airliners which struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. The jihadis were bent on punishing president Nicolas Sarkozy for posting fresh French troops to Afghanistan.

Should further investigations connect the two Muslim passengers to this conspiracy, it would go far to indicate that the Air France flight was destined to crash over Paris - except that the plan misfired and the plane came down sooner than planned over the Atlantic.

According to our sources, the French flight crews warned of the plot might have succeeded into pre-empting it by an extraordinary act of bravery to crash the plane in the ocean before it reached France.

Alternatively, the two purported terrorists may have been on a suicide operation like the Egyptian Airline pilot who brought his Boeing 767 into the Atlantic off the US coast on March 31, 1999.