By Mai Shams El-Din
CAIRO: Prosecutor General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud referred a complaint filed against renowned journalist Mohamed Hassanien Heikal to the military prosecution.
The complaint was filed by former officers of the Egyptian Air Forces against Heikal for his remarks questioning the importance of the air strike, which he says was used to give legitimacy to ousted president Hosni Mubarak, who led the strike during the 1973 war.
Heikal’s media office refused to comment.
In an interview published May 13 in the state-run Al-Ahram daily, Heikal said that the original war plan was to have 18 planes launch an air strike against Israel, but it was then-president Anwar Sadat’s wish to include 140 planes to raise the morale of the Egyptian army, whose air forces were destroyed in 1967.
“The real Israeli targets that the Egyptian Air Forces had to attack did not need this wide coverage,” Heikal said in the interview, but it was Sadat who wanted a show of force “against Israel’s attack in 1967. He wanted to see the Egyptian Air Forces regain their self-confidence by carrying out the first preemptive attack.”
The former officers who took part in the 1973 air strike published a comment in Al-Ahram refuting Heikal’s claims.
“The first air strike is not owned by or attributed to someone — it belongs to the Egyptian [population] and their armed forces and it is a result of the efforts of thousands of engineers, pilots and leaders, a consequence of intensive training from 1967 until 1973 that led to the martyrdom of 45 pilots,” the officials said.
