WASHINGTON, July 5: A rare spat between Israel and its chief ally, the United States, appeared to be brewing on Friday over whether Thursday’s shooting at the El Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles arport constituted a “terrorist” act.

Pending the completion of an investigation, US officials have said they have “no evidence” that the shooting was the work of terrorists while Israeli officials maintain it was “a terrorist attack.”

US officials identified the gunman who killed two people Thursday before being shot dead by a security agent at the Los Angeles airport counter of Israeli airline El Al as an Egyptian immigrant, but said the shooting appeared to be an isolated incident.

“There is no evidence, no indication at this time, that this is terrorists,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

Fleicher’s comments were later echoed by an FBI spokesman who said investigators had not uncovered anything to suggest that the man, 41-year-old Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, had any connection to terrorist groups or harbored anti-Israel views.

But in Israel, a senior official close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said “there’s no doubt that the shooting at El Al counter at Los Angeles airport was a terrorist attack.”

The difference in interpretations of the motive for Thursday’s shooting underscores the difficulty in defining what “terrorism” is — a problem that has become more pronounced since the September 11 attacks in the United States and the onset of the US-led war on terrorism.

This difficulty is spelled out in the US State Department’s annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism Report.”

“No one definition of terrorism has gained universal acceptance,” the report acknowledges in an introductory section that has been published in the document since at least 1996.

The report uses a definition for terrorism contained in federal legislation that it says the US government has used “for statistical and analytical purposes since 1983.”

That statute — which appears in Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(d) — offers the following definition for terrorism.—AFP