Egypt’s aviation minister said on Thursday that a “terrorist attack” was a more likely cause than technical failure for the plane’s disappearance from radar screens on a flight from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board.
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The messages indicated intense smoke in the front portion of the plane.
In Paris, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault was meeting Saturday with family members of the passengers and crew aboard the EgyptAir flight.
The messages, he said, “generally mean the start of a fire”.
“These messages do not allow in any way to say what may have caused smoke or fire on board the aircraft”, said a spokesman for the French BEA agency, which is assisting an official Egyptian investigation.
The photos showed a yellow life vest from the flight, along with twisted blue metal panels. The error warnings also indicated that the flight control computer malfunctioned, the Journal report said.
“Certainly, the backdrop is suggestive of terrorism in the sense that we have the Russian plane in Sharm el-Sheikh and we have the aspiration we’ve seen time and time again, not only of ISIL (Islamic State) now but of AQAP (al Qaeda), still very potent and still very determined to bring down aircraft”.
Philip Baum, the editor of Aviation Security International Magazine, told the BBC that the indications of smoke mean a technical failure cannot be ruled out.
A minute later at 2.27 a.m., there was an avionics smoke alert.
One of the pilots on board the flight that went missing on Thursday morning can be heard telling traffic control “Good day, er, good night”.
Search crews had found human remains, seats and luggage from the crashed aircraft yesterday.
Egypt’s army spokesman said debris and passenger belongings have been located 180 miles off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt. There were 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis and one person each from Britain, Canada, Belgium, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Sudan, Chad and Portugal. They included a child and two babies.
The European Space Agency said one of its satellites had on Thursday spotted an oil slick about 40 kilometres southeast of the plane’s last known location.
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Although early suspicion centered on Islamist militants who blew up another airliner over Egypt seven months ago, no group had claimed responsibility more than 36 hours after the disappearance of flight MS804, an Airbus A320.
