No Comprende It’s a Riddle
The strange case of the “Egyptian radio” gets a little stranger, though not, apparently, to the Associated Press’s way of thinking. In a baffling litte item in today’s papers, we are told
Charges have been dropped against the Egyptian graduate student accused of lying to federal investigators about an aviation radio found in his hotel room near the World Trade Center, a U.S. attorney’s office spokesman said Wednesday.
Another hotel guest came forward after Abdallah Higazy was charged this week and told officials the radio belonged to him, said Marvin Smilon, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Prosecutors had accused Higazy, the son of an Egyptian diplomat, of interfering with the investigation into the Sept. 11 attack, which demolished the trade center towers and killed about 2,900 people.
Higazy had insisted in two rounds of FBI interviews that he knew nothing of the hand-held radio found in a safe in his room along with his Egyptian passport, a copy of the Quran and a gold medallion, prosecutors had said.
Unqualified Offerings finds itself with a couple of questions after reading this item:
1) So an aviation radio really was present in this New York hotel-room safe at the time of the attacks, correct? That part of the original story doesn’t seem to have changed.
2) Who was this other hotel guest who claimed the radio? What nationality? What connections to anyone’s government?
3) How did he get the radio into Higazy’s room safe?
4) Have “prosecutors” asked the man these questions? Where is he now?
5) Did AP ask the prosecutors the above things? (If not, why not?)
6) Did they answer?
7) Isn’t that part of the story too, if they did or didn’t?
