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Egypt sends submarine to search for evidence of crashed flight

Relatives of the missing passengers gathered in Paris and Cairo airports in hopes of good news from both Egyptian and Greek authorities.

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Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi announced the deployment of the submarine Sunday.

The investigations would carry on in all possible directions, and no possibility would be ruled out, he added. The minister also said that the wreck of the aircraft may lie as deep as “3,000 feet” (900 meters) in the Mediterranean. MOD Egypt More debris collected by search teams.

But he was more cautious Sunday, urging the media not to jump to conclusions or speculate about what caused the crash.

EgyptAir said passengers included: 30 Egyptians; 15 French; two Iraqis; one Briton; one Belgian; one Sudanese; one Chadian; one Portuguese; one Algerian; one Canadian; one Saudi and one Kuwaiti.

The first pictures of the wreckage recovered from the sea were also released.

Smoke was detected inside an EgyptAir plane shortly before it plunged into the Mediterranean with 66 people on board, investigators said Saturday, offering clues but no answers about why it crashed.

ACAR, which stands for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, is a digital system that transmits short messages between aircraft and ground stations.

Messages sent by the aircraft indicate that smoke was detected in the toilet, avionics bay and perhaps even in the cockpit prior to the crash.

While the French investigators are collaborating with the Egyptian authorities to get to the cause of the crash, it is suspected to have been brought down by some act of terrorism.

Life vests, shoes, handbags and seats were all recovered from the expanse of Mediterranean where the flight crashed.

As funerals were held across Cairo for Egyptian victims of the crash, Ayman El-Moqadem, head of the government-appointed investigation committee, said an initial report into the incident would be completed within a month, according to a report in the state-run Ahram newspaper.

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Greece, France, the United States and other nations were searching about 130 nautical miles southeast of the Greek island of Karpathos, Greek aviation officials said. The Daesh extremist group, which operates in Sinai, claimed responsibility and published a photograph of a soft drink can which it said had been filled with explosives and smuggled onto the flight.

Huge hunt for wreckage of Egypt Air MS804 in Mediterranean ongoing