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Cairo — A noise was heard in the last second of the cockpit voice recording from the Russian plane that crashed last week in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the head of the joint investigation team said on Saturday, bolstering US and British suspicions that the plane was brought down by a bomb.
However, Ayman el-Muqadem warned it was too early to say what caused the plane to apparently break up in mid-flight. Analysis of the noise was under way to identify its nature.
“All scenarios are being considered . . . it could be lithium batteries in the luggage of one of the passengers, it could be an explosion in the fuel tank,” El-Muqadem, who is Egyptian and leading the investigation committee that includes experts from Russia, France, Germany and Ireland, where the plane was registered. El-Muqadem appeared alone at the news conference in Cairo.
US and British officials have cited intelligence reports as indicating that the flight from the Sinai resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg was brought down on October 31 by a bomb on board. All 224 people onboard, most of them Russian tourists, were killed.
The Islamic State group (ISIS) claimed they brought down the Metrojet flight, without offering any proof, saying it was in retaliation for Moscow’s airstrikes that began a month earlier against fighters in Syria.
El-Muqadem said debris was found scattered across a 13km stretch of desert, indicating the Airbus A321-200 broke up mid-air, but initial observations don’t shed light on what caused it. Some pieces of wreckage were still missing, while the recovered pieces will be taken to Cairo for analysis.
Egyptian airport and security officials told The Associated Press on Saturday that authorities were questioning airport staff and ground crew who worked on the downed Russian flight and had placed some employees under surveillance. The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.
Also Saturday, Egypt’s foreign minister complained that Western governments had not sufficiently helped Egypt in its war on terrorism.
Egypt’s past calls for assistance and co-ordination on terrorism issues from “the countries that are now facing the danger” had not been dealt with seriously, Sameh Shoukry told a news conference. “European countries did not give us the co-operation we are hoping for,” he said.
Egyptian authorities have been trying to whip up support for a war on terror after the military overthrow of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi in 2013. A crackdown on Islamists and a series of militant attacks on security buildings and checkpoints, mainly in the Sinai Peninsula, have followed Morsi’s ousting – with a Sinai-based affiliate of the Islamic State group claiming responsibility for some of the most devastating attacks.
Shoukry also said countries that have suspended flights to Sharm el-Sheikh — which include the UK and Russia, though the foreign minister did not specifically name them — did not share with Cairo the intelligence upon which they based their decisions. Egypt “expected that the information available would be communicated to us instead of being broadcast” in the media, he said.
Russia announced Friday it was suspending flights to all of Egypt, joining the UK and Ireland, which had stopped flights to Sharm el-Sheikh. At least a half-dozen Western European governments told their citizens not to travel there. Empty charter planes have been flying to Sharm el-Sheikh to bring home stranded Russian and British tourists. Passengers were banned from checking in luggage — reflecting an apparent concern about security and luggage-screening procedures at the airport.
The crash one week ago dealt a huge blow to Egypt’s battered tourism sector, which is yet to fully recover from years of political turmoil. Russians comprise nearly a third of all tourists who visited Egypt in the past year. — AFP
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