New York Post89%
Exclusive | Egyptian terror group claimed responsibility for downing TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996, new FBI records reveal 64%
By Geoff Earle90%
7/18/2026, 1:00:42 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Burden of Proof, Availability Heuristic, and Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 15.5% saturation with 106 hits. Analysis detected 1,083 faulty-reasoning hits from 682 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 58.2% and a BS Rank of 64% (8,074 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 63.10% of the article peer group.
A terror group from Egypt told the FBI it was responsible for downing TWA Flight 800 and killing all 230 people aboard, according to newly surfaced FBI records featured in a new documentary marking the 30th anniversary of the tragedy.
An explosive claim buried in a trove of newly obtained Freedom of Information Act documents is reviving decades-old questions about whether a missile or bomb brought down the Boeing 747-100 off Long Island on July 17, 1996.
Among the records obtained by the transparency nonprofit Judicial Watch is a New York teletype dated two days after the crash, case file 265A-NY-259028: “FBI headquarters received faxes generated from Cairo claiming credit for the destruction of the aircraft,” the cable states.
The document does not name the terror group or otherwise provide an assessment by investigators at the time of the veracity of its claim to have brought down the jet.
A 14-month FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force probe, along with a four-year National Transportation Safety Board investigation, ultimately rejected that theory.
But it’s existence is prompting a series of questions from Judicial Watch, which filed suit in federal court this week against the NTSB to get more information and whose findings will be featured in a new 45-minute documentary, “Judicial Watch Investigates TWA 800 – 30 Years Later,” which debuts Saturday on YouTube.
“Let’s see the faxes.
Did you pursue it?
To what degree?
Was it a fraudster?
Was it legitimate?”
asked the group's chief investigator, Chris Farrell, who has spent years trying to untangle the evidence.
“That’s pretty alarming considering there was a massive effort to swat that theory down back in ‘96,” he added.
“Cairo at that point was a hotbed for all kinds of militant Islamist supremacists.”
TWA Flight 800 departed JFK International Airport in New York at 8:19 p.m., bound for Paris, and blew up 12 minutes after take off over the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches, New York.
All 18 crew and 212 passengers died instantly.
The NTSB determined after its investigation that the “probable cause” of the accident was “an explosion of the center wing fuel tank (CWT) resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank.
“Contributing factors to the accident were the design and certification concept that fuel tank explosions could be prevented solely by precluding all ignition sources and the design and certification of the Boeing 747 with heat sources located beneath the CWT with no means to reduce the heat transferred into the CWT or to render the fuel vapor in the tank nonflammable.”
The Post has reached out to the FBI and CIA for comment.
“Despite a wealth of circumstantial evidence indicating that the aircraft was struck by a missile fired from a sea-borne platform, the exact cause of the explosion remains a mystery,” it states.
Numerous eyewitnesses said they saw streaks of light before the explosion.
A CIA video simulation said witnesses were seeing burning, leaking fuel.
“The curl was gone, they flattened it like a pancake.
And so they altered the evidence to make it like there was no internal damage caused by an external force,” Stalcup said in the documentary.
Asked to comment on Stalcup's claims, the NTSB referenced its earlier report.
“The source of ignition energy for the explosion could not be determined with certainty, but, of the sources evaluated by the investigation, the most likely was a short circuit outside of the CWT that allowed excessive voltage to enter it through electrical wiring associated with the fuel quantity indication system,” it said.
Farrell refuses to accept the official explanation.
“I can tell you that the official explanation — this guess that a spark of unknown origin somehow ignited the center fuel tank is preposterous,” he said.
The group is hoping the documentary renews interest in the strange and tragic story, and prompts government agencies to hand over additional documents that might fill in still more details.
“They have not been forthcoming,” said Farrell.
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87%flagged-word coverageChris Farrell
85 attributed words32% of attributed speech79% writer coverage
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