Air Crash Probe Bungled, Congress Told : Disaster: U.S., Canadian agencies are assailed for not pursuing terrorist links to accident that killed 248 GIs.

WASHINGTON — The cause of a 1985 airplane crash in Canada that killed 248 American soldiers remained a mystery Tuesday as witnesses at a congressional hearing blasted the Canadian government’s findings and demanded a full U.S. investigation.

“The one overwhelming certainty is that our families never came home for Christmas,” said J. D. Phillips, a St. Petersburg, Fla., physician whose only son died in the crash of a charter plane carrying members of a U.S. Army peacekeeping force returning from the Middle East. All eight crew members also died.

Phillips was one of several witnesses before the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime who called for a broad U.S. inquiry to answer the many unresolved questions surrounding the Dec. 12, 1985, crash at Gander, Newfoundland.

“I don’t know what happened at Gander, but I do know that we must chase facts, not theories,” said Rep. Robin Tallon (D-S.C.), who has suggested that terrorism may have been involved.

Rep. William J. Hughes (D-N.J.), chairman of the subcommittee, called it premature to request an additional investigation. But he was sharply critical of the U.S. role in the initial investigation by the Canadian Air Safety Board.

“Incredibly, no U.S. government agency, or at least none with official responsibility, demonstrated any determination to find out just what caused the crash,” Hughes said.

The Canadian board, split 5 to 4, adopted a report in 1988 that blamed the crash on ice it said accumulated on the wings just before takeoff. The dissenters said in a separate report that an on-board explosion had sent the DC-8 to a fiery crash half a mile from the end of the runway.

“The plane did not burst into a giant fireball in the sky because of ice on the wings,” Leslie T. Filotas, an aeronautical engineer and one of the Canadian dissenters, told the subcommittee.

Eyewitnesses reported that the plane exploded a few seconds after takeoff and then crashed. Autopsies also indicated there may have been an explosion before the crash. The flight had originated in Egypt.

Two days after the crash, Canadian authorities concluded that terrorism was not involved. U.S. officials accepted that assessment, despite assertions relayed to two American embassies that the crash was the result of sabotage.

Nicholas V. O’Hara, deputy assistant director of the FBI, testified that such claims are commonplace and that no credible evidence has surfaced indicating that terrorism or sabotage were involved.

George Seidlein, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board investigator assigned to participate in the Canadian investigation, said that no evidence of an explosion was found at the scene and that no evidence of terrorist involvement was uncovered.

An unreleased, internal report prepared by the subcommittee staff said no evidence of terrorism has been uncovered because there was no investigation of possible terrorism. The report speculated that it is too late to reconstruct and re-evaluate that possibility.