The head of the investigation into the October 31 crash, in which all 217 people on board EgyptAir flight 990 were killed in the Atlantic, told reporters that speculation about a pilot suicide had ``caused pain'' to the victims' families and ``done a disservice to the longstanding friendship between the people of the United States of America and Egypt''.

James Hall, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that some speculation about what went on in the cockpit of the doomed Boeing 767 in the minutes before the crash was ``flat wrong''. Hall's attempt to calm the storm in Egypt came as one US newspaper claimed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ``retracted'' an earlier suggestion that pointed to suicide by the co-pilot.

The Wall Street Journal quoted an FBIsource as saying that the words ``I have made my decision now'', which had been attributed to the co-pilot, Gameel al-Batouty, after an initial examination of the plane's voice data, were ``not on the tape''. An FBI spokesman dismissed the Journal's claim as ``erroneous'', but uncertainty continues to surround the sequence of events and words in the EgyptAir cockpit, and fuel an increasingly tense diplomatic situation between Egypt and the US. Hall refused to clarify the mystery in his briefing to reporters on Friday.

The confusion in Washington came as Egyptian officials stated that the investigation would not now be handled as a criminal act. ``A political agreement was reached with the US side that the file will remain with the NTSB,'' Murad Shawki, a senior Egyptian air safety investigator said as he arrived in New York. Hall said twice on Friday that the EgyptAir crash ``might be the result of a deliberate act'', a conclusion which would contradict the Egyptian statement and imply that theinvestigation will ultimately be handed over to the FBI.

The increasingly political nature of the dispute and a succession of media leaks about the contents of the flight data and pilot voice recorders has alarmed the US state department, whose spokesman, James Rubin, this week called on US officials to stop briefing the media unofficially. Hall said the work of deciphering and transcribing the final conversations in the plane's cockpit was ``a painstaking process, compounded by the fact that it is almost entirely in Arabic''. He announced that the NTSB had invested in Arabic language computer software to ensure an accurate translation.

-- The Observer News Service