The Israeli military said on Saturday it had offered its help to Egypt and Russia after a Russian airliner carrying 224 passengers and crew crashed in the Sinai peninsula.
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The plane was operated by Metrojet, a small airline formerly called Kolavia. There is no word on survivors, according to Egyptian officials.
USA officials have offered their condolences to Russia and to all the families involved in the crash of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt. There have been persistent media reports that they have acquired Russian shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles.
But, shortly afterwards, members of an Egyptian search and rescue team said they had heard voices in a section of the plane. But moments after it topped 400 knots and 33,000 feet, the airliner’s speed abruptly fell to just 93 knots, with an altitude of 28,375 feet, according to the Flight Radar data.
Turkish government spokesmen said they had no information about the missing Russian plane ever entering Turkish airspace.
Beforehand, Egyptian air traffic control said it had lost contact with the civilian airliner carrying.
Al-Mokadem reportedly said the flight’s pilot feared a technical failure and sent an alert calling for landing at the nearest airport.
Russia’s transport minister Maksim Sokolov and the head of Russia’s air transport agency Alexander Neradko are also leaving for the site, Russian agencies quoted the ministry’s representative as saying. Also, the Foreign Ministry of Belarus says its embassy in Egypt is working to determine whether Belarusian citizens were on board.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said it had launched a criminal probe into any possible violation of air safety rules, a standard procedure when air crashes involving Russian planes occur. Russian Federation has opened a hotline for relatives, many of whom have already gathered at the airport in St. Petersburg.
Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail confirmed that the Russian plane did crash in the Sinai.
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“Minutes after its take-off, we lost contact with the plane, bound for an airport in federal Russian Federation”, an aviation official said. The aircraft, an Airbus A321, was 18 years old, it added.
