“The whole country has seen this, everyone in Russia, and I want to thank you for your words of sympathy and condolence”, Putin said in a meeting with the Russian transport minister.
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“The speculation that this plane was brought down by a missile is off the table”, the official said.
Within hours of the crash, the Egyptian affiliate of IS, which has a stronghold in the northern Sinai, claimed it had downed the jet in retaliation for Russian air strikes targeting its jihadists in Syria. “We [are] excluding technical problems and rejecting human error”. In 2010, one of the company’s Tupolev planes (Russian made passenger planes) leased to an Iranian carrier made a hard landing and broke up and caught fire, injuring 46 passengers.
Alexander Smirnov, the deputy general director of Metrojet, added the crash “could only have been a mechanical impact on the plane” in the air.
On Monday US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said it was “unlikely” that IS was involved in the Kogalymavia plane crash but did not rule out the possibility.
Egyptian activists stand in front of the Russian embassy while holding placards in solidarity with the Russian passengers who died in Saturday’s plane crash over Sinai, in Cairo, Egypt, November 1, 2015.
According to the official, USA intelligence analysts believe it could have been a few kind of explosion on the aircraft itself, either a fuel tank or a bomb, but that there’s no indication that a surface-to-air missile brought the plane down.
A plane carrying the remains of additional victims of the plane crash is expected in St. Petersburg.
According to Interfax, the recordings also suggest “there was a sudden emergency situation on board which took the crew by surprise, and the pilots did not have time to send a distress signal”.
Meanwhile, tearful family members on Tuesday began identifying the first 10 bodies of victims, whose names have not yet been released. He did not specify what that action might have been, saying it was up to the official investigation to determine.
Additionally, 140 bodies and more than 100 body parts were transported by two planes to St. Petersburg, with a third to follow Tuesday night.
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Metrojet, the carrier that operated the aircraft, said on Monday that the crash could not have been caused by equipment failure or pilot error.
