Who sold the Egyptian President’s aircraft to Israel?
By Iqbal Tamimi
It might be possible to sell a personal small item, and find such deal difficult to trace, but can anyone imagine selling an aircraft without finding any trace of who sold it to whom, or who cashed the price? This puzzling question is preoccupying the Egyptians who found out that their late president’s aircraft was sold to the nation’s ‘enemy’ without any shred of information about how this happened.
It has been revealed that the Israeli Air Force owns the private plane onboard which the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat travelled to Israel in 1977.
This fact caused a wave of shock amongst the Egyptians who had no idea how the plane ended up in Israel, especially when Egypt Air denied any knowledge of such deal.
The Israeli newspaper “Yedioth Ahronoth,” reported that the Israeli air force has bought the Boeing 707 aircraft which was used to transfer the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Israel in 1977. The newspaper said that the plane was experiencing technical problems, which prompted the Egyptians to sell it, and claimed that the plane was shifted from one company to another”, until it ended up in a warehouse in Thailand, from which Israel has purchased it, because a number of senior Israeli officials knew about the aircraft and decided immediately to purchase it.
On board this same plane, the ex Egyptian President, Husni Mubarak as well travelled to Israel in 199, to participate in the funeral of the late Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, before it was sold in 2005 to ‘a private airline’.
A long debate went on in Egypt about this mysterious transaction especially when “Egypt Air”, the national air carrier, denied selling the “historic” presidential plane to the Israeli Air Force and claimed not to know anything about it.
In response to the report published by the Israeli newspaper, the head of the holding company for Egypt Air, Hussein Masoud, said the company has nothing to do with the above mentioned sale, pointing out that this plane has never been part of the properties of Egypt Air. He also explained that the plane in question had entered Egypt in 1974, and the only connection it had with Egypt Air is its maintenance and service, exactly as Egypt Air offer maintenance services for any other airplane in return of a certain fee. But Masoud revealed that Egypt Air was on the members of the committee that evaluated the price of the plane.
The Egyptian Gas was sold to Israel without the consent of the nation, and now the Egyptians discovered that a historic aircraft was sold to Israel without any news coverage of such deal by mainstream media. The Egyptians are worried now, what else has been sold without the nation’s knowledge, and who banked the cash.
tamimi@awmwc.net