It’s the nearest the Russian government has come to saying a bomb may have caused the crash.
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“A noise was heard in the last second” on the voice recorder, he said, adding: “A spectral analysis will be carried out by specialised labs in order to identify the nature of this sound”.
“I think there’s a growing body of intelligence and evidence that this was a bomb – still not conclusive – but a growing body of evidence”, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on the ABC program “This Week”.
Amid the tourist exodus from Egypt, a senior operative of the Islamic State jihadist group, Ashraf Ali Ali Hassanein al-Gharabli, was shot dead in an exchange of fire in Cairo after police tried to arrest him, the interior ministry said. NSA also intercepted messages after the crash of the plane in which ISIS members were celebrating the downing of the plane.
Hammond told reporters at United Nations headquarters in NY on Monday that Britain has shared a few information with its partners but can not share a few “sensitive intelligence”.
Egypt has launched its own separate investigation into the possibility of a bomb being planted aboard the Kolavia flight, a senior Egyptian official told BBC.
The very fact that the British-born fighters were present in the ranks of Sinai’s IS affiliate, which before swearing allegiance to the Iraq- and Syria-based group was known as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, suggests there is more to its declared allegiance than mere rhetoric. We are the ones with God’s blessing who brought it down. “All of them have been killed, and thanks to God for that”. We will attack you at your own places, and we will not make any difference between old and young.
But in the meantime, he warned, the British government had received information about the October 31 disaster that had caused it to suspend flights to the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh and to order the evacuation of British tourists there.
As of last night at least 17,000 British tourists were still stranded in Sharm el-Sheikh. The attack on the Russian plane has already caused an exodus of Western tourists from Sinai, and a few airlines have halted flights to Sharm el-Sheikh or refused to take check-in luggage on flights from Egypt.
Fears of more terror attacks against civilian planes in Sinai exacerbated on Sunday when news broke that during the summer, Waliyat Sinai probably tried to bring down another civilian aircraft in the Sharm al-Sheikh region.
The first officer was in charge of the plane at the time “but the pilot was in the cockpit and saw the rocket coming toward the plane”, the Daily Mail source said. “He ordered that the flight turn to the left to avoid the rocket, which was about 1,000ft away”. No passengers were told about the incident after landing.
Earlier Wednesday, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi made a surprise visit to the Sharm el-Sheikh airport.
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Britain has begun flying thousands of tourists home from the Egyptian resort, but there have been delays as they are screened and separated from their luggage.
