In a series of posts on its official Twitter account, EgyptAir said it had lost contact with the plane – which had been carrying 56 passengers, seven crew members and three security personnel – in the early hours of Thursday.
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The first photographs have emerged of debris of EgyptAir flight 804, which crashed into the Mediterranean on its way to Cairo from Paris, killing all 66 people on board.
The plane sent automated messages indicating smoke a few minutes before it disappeared from radar into the Mediterranean Sea, BEA spokesman Sebastien Barthe told NBC News.
However, he added: “We are drawing no conclusions from this. Everything else is pure conjecture”.
However, there is growing speculation that inflight data suggests the plane crashed after fire and smoke was detected from the toilet, which indicates a possible terrorist bomb plant.
Recovery teams are searching for the plane’s all-important black-box recorders that could hold key clues as to why it suddenly fell from the sky.
The recorders are crucial for Egyptian and French investigators to find because the data recorder will describe how the Airbus A320 was operating and the voice recorder will have what the pilots were saying before the crash on Thursday with 66 people on board.
Also on Saturday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said no theory on the cause of the crash has yet been ruled out, though Egypt’s aviation minister has pointed to terrorism as more likely than technical failure.
According to the president, the submarine moved on Sunday “in the direction of the plane crash site” and Egypt’s authorities “are working hard to salvage the black boxes”.
Government investigators said it would be a month before they would release preliminary findings.
No group has claimed to have brought down the aircraft. The manifest was leaked online and had not been verified by the airline.
The passengers included 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis, two Canadians, and citizens from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.
On Friday, Egypt’s authorities said they had so far found human remains and plane wreckage floating in the Mediterranean about 290 km north of Egypt’s port city of Alexandria.
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Flight 804 departed Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport at 11:09 p.m. Wednesday and was bound for Cairo when it crashed into the sea.
