Earnest said the US hadn’t determined what caused the crash. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss intelligence matters publicly. It is known for that, the official said.
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Rather, it is believed whoever was behind it used a conventional bomb and took advantage of lax security or had someone complicit at the airport, the official said.
David Cameron’s decision to intervene in the mystery of the Sinai air crash by speculating that a bomb may have bought down Flight 7K9268 will have been greeted with cold fury in the Kremlin. Information from the flight data recorder has been successfully copied and handed over to investigators, the Russians added.
“While the investigation is still ongoing, we can not say categorically why the Russian jet crashed”, the Prime Minister’s office said.
Hammond’s remarks came as Britain prepares to host a visit by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi this week. It was en route to St. Petersburg from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. “But there is intelligence suggesting an assist from someone at the airport”. He said that flights from Britain to Sharm el-Sheikh would be suspended indefinitely and that the thousands of Britons already in the city would return home under “emergency procedures for additional screening”.
Several airlines, including Lufthansa and Air France, stopped flying over Sinai after the crash, but British carriers had kept to their schedules.
Hammond later told the BBC that evacuation flights would likely begin Friday, and that he expected “more and more” countries to follow Britain’s lead by suspending travel to and from Sharm el-Sheikh.
As many as 244 people died when a Russian airliner carrying 224 passengers crashed into a mountainous area of Egypt’s Sinai on November 1.
Two US officials told the AP on Tuesday that USA satellite imagery detected heat around the jet just before it went down.
The signs pointing to ISIS, another US official said, are partially based on monitoring of internal messages of the terrorist group.
Douglas Barrie, military aerospace expert with the worldwide Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said it was too soon to say for sure the cause of the crash but the “general suspicion” that an explosive device was involved has been mounting. He said the British government’s decision made sense.
“The investigation team does not have any evidence or data confirming this hypothesis”, Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamal said, according to the statement. But the cockpit voice recorder “received serious mechanical damage”. “That’s our priority, that’s what we’ll work with the Egyptians to do”, he said. Metrojet officials have insisted the crash was due to an “external impact”, not a technical malfunction or pilot error.
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The group reiterated its assertion Wednesday in an audio clip that appeared to taunt Russian and Egyptian officials who have sought to play down suggestions that terrorism was to blame. An opinion poll by one of Russia’s few independent pollsters last month found that only 14 per cent of Russians agree that Moscow should provide “direct military support” to the Syrian government.
