Within hours of the crash, the Egyptian affiliate of IS, which has a stronghold in the northern Sinai, claimed it had downed the jet in retaliation for Russian air strikes targeting its jihadists in Syria.
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The United States, Germany and Britain all had overflight warnings in place for the Sinai. Experts started retrieving data from the recorders on Monday, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said. They advised airlines to avoid flying over the peninsula below 26,000 feet and to avoid the Sharm el-Sheikh airport due to extremist violence and, notably, the use of anti-aircraft weapons.
The A321-200 was built in 1997, and Kogalymavia, which is also known as Metrojet, had been operating it since 2012, Airbus said in a statement. And a state-owned television channel broadcast an interview with the pilot’s wife, who said her husband had complained about poor maintenance on the plane. Sabotage would require familiarity with the electrical or fuel systems of the A321-200, but hiding a bomb would need less knowledge, he added. “All those interested in the matter are welcome to participate in the investigation”.
However, it appeared to chime with accounts from eyewitnesses who said the plane fell flaming from the sky.
The Egyptian government said the black boxes were being examined by Egyptian and Russian experts along with German and French specialists from Airbus and from Ireland where the aircraft was registered. “We rule out a technical fault and any mistake by the crew”, he said.
A Metrojet official said Monday that the black boxes hadn’t been read or decoded yet. “This explains why they didn’t attempt to contact air traffic and report the incident happening on board”. All 224 people aboard the plane were killed in Saturday’s crash, including a former program director for Hillel Russian Federation.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow “cannot exclude any version” of what caused the crash as investigations were still ongoing, but warned against “guessing” at the reason. The site said that three receivers were tracking the plane when it took off but all three lost signal at the same time, about 20 minutes into the flight.
He told a news conference: “There are no such things as engine failure or other defects that could lead to an aircraft breaking apart in mid-air. I mean, an airplane just can not fly at those lower speeds”, said CNN aviation analyst Les Abend, although he cautioned that the Flightradar information was very preliminary.
A deputy governor of St. Petersburg says the first nine bodies of the victims of Saturday’s plane crash over Egypt have been identified.
In the Sinai, aviation experts and search teams have been combing a 16 square kilometer area (more than 6 square miles) to find bodies and pieces of the jet.
Meanwhile, the head of the Russian Federal Aviation Agency has chided the owner of the plane that crashed in Egypt on Saturday for pointing to one cause of the crash, saying investigators simply do not have enough data to reach any conclusion. Neradko also mentioned that Egyptian authorities will not begin studying the black boxes until representatives of all the involved parties arrive.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said it could take months to establish the truth behind the crash though his country was cooperating with Russian Federation to aid investigations. Russian Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Puchkov promised they will not rest until all victims’ remains are found.
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Early Monday, a Russian plane carrying the remains of 144 of the crash victims landed in St. Petersburg, Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti reported.
