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Police officials promptly centered their investigation on a Lebanese woman of about 30 who was traveling under the name May Elias Mansur. She had reportedly flown from Beirut to Cairo on March 25 and on the morning of April 2 had flown on the TWA plane from Cairo to Athens, along with only 16 other passengers. She arrived late for the flight, but Egyptian authorities insisted that her luggage had been inspected. The woman had been subjected to the usual body search, but because of the lateness of the hour was driven in an airline car rather than a bus to the plane, where she identified her luggage before boarding. She sat in seat 10-F, and during much of the flight kept the table down over her lap and listened to cassette tapes on earphones. After arriving in Athens, she spent seven hours in the transit lounge, leaving on a Middle East Airlines flight for Beirut shortly after the crippled TWA 727, on its return from Rome, made its emergency landing in Athens. On Friday, in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli, a woman who identified herself as Mansur strongly denied that she had had any role in "such a terrorist crime."
Greek investigators speculated that the explosion on the plane may have been caused by a Czechoslovak-made plastic explosive called Semtex, which East bloc countries export in large quantities to Lebanon. Dark orange in color and claylike in consistency, Semtex can be detected by trained dogs but apparently not by existing airport equipment. Authorities believed that the bomb, which may have been no larger than two bars of soap, could have had a plastic timer that would not have set off the metal-detecting machines at the Cairo airport.
On the day of the explosion aboard Flight 840, an anonymous caller telephoned a Western news agency in Beirut and said that the bomb had been planted by a little-known group called the Izzeddin Qassam unit of the Arab Revolutionary Cells, which in turn is linked to Palestinian renegade Abu Nidal, probably the world's most wanted terrorist. The caller said the bombing was in retaliation for U.S. missile attacks on Libyan targets last month during the showdown over the right of foreign ships to use the waters of the Gulf of Sidra. A four-page handwritten statement repeating this claim and promising further attacks against U.S. targets "across the world" was later delivered to Beirut newspapers. Qassam was slain by the British during a revolt in Palestine in 1936. His name has frequently been used by terrorist factions linked to Abu Nidal, whose real name is Sabry Khalil Bana and who officially broke away from Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fatah organization in 1974.
The boasts of terrorists for the sake of publicity are notoriously unreliable. On Friday, for instance, still another Palestinian splinter group made the improbable claim that it was responsible for the crash of the Mexican airliner early last week. But the link between Abu Nidal and the TWA bombing seemed plausible. His dossier of terrorist acts includes the killing of a number of Palestinian foes and Israeli officials and the bombing of synagogues in Europe. His group may also have been involved in last year's hijacking of an EgyptAir plane, leading to the death of 60 people when the craft was stormed in Malta by Egyptian troops.