Nasser Hanna, 45, manager of one of the companies handling the Russian flights, said: “Where is Sharm airport supposed to keep all that luggage?”
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Qatar Airways, the second largest carrier in the Middle East, has stopped flying along the Sinai border on routes to Cyprus and Lebanon since the crash.
Several senior USA intelligence, military and national security officials have told CNN about the growing confidence that terrorists bombed the plane.
British passengers are only allowed to travel with hand baggage, after suspicion fell on a bomb being placed in the hold of the Airbus A321 that crashed on Oct 31, killing 224 people, but airport authorities are struggling to cope with the backlog of suitcases.
USA and British officials say the cause of the October 31 crash, which killed all 224 people on board, was likely a bomb planted on the plane.
The inspection is to end on Thursday.
An extremist group based in the Sinai Peninsula announced last week that it was behind the attack that brought down the plane: Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, which began operating in 2011 and pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2014, claimed responsibility.
Around 60,000 Russian tourists remain stranded in Egypt, according to Russia’s federal tourism agency (Rosturizm), after flights to the country were suspended. Poor lighting in one corner of the airport was also a concern.
“We, with God’s grace, are the ones who brought it down, and we are not obliged to disclose the mechanism of its demise”, the spokesman said in Arabic.
Western sources have criticized Egyptian security procedures at Sharm el-Sheikh’s airport, but “Sharm is a very secure city”, Amrani said.
Britain’s GCHQ, the government’s secret listening centre, earlier picked up “chatter” in Egypt immediately after the Russian plane crash which included voices of terrorist conspirators with London and Birmingham accents.
“The situation for United Kingdom flights in Sharm el-Sheikh remains fluid”.
However, 11 flights carrying a total of 2,301 British passengers left Sharm on Monday, according to the Foreign Office – meaning more than 7,500 tourists have now been repatriated.
He said he had a “high degree of confidence” in the bomb attack scenario, which matched his “gut feeling” all along, and matched up with intelligence reports and flight data from the plane.
“The sad fact is, because of we’ve had a failed policy and failed leadership, now we’re having to rely on Russians and the Iranians to go into Syria to fight and destroy ISIS, and that’s kind of where we are today”, McCaul said.
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Still, anonymous aviation experts reported to the Russian newspaper Kommersant that the damage to the plane “suggests explosive decompression to the fuselage”.
