The growing confidence in the bomb hypothesis comes as Russian authorities continue to fly home the remains of victims for identification.
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The 39-year-old had been left stranded at the Red Sea resort after prime
minister David Cameron grounded all flights from the country following a suspected terrorist attack on a Russian airline.
Israeli officials would not comment on the claims.
On Saturday the head of Egypt’s investigative committee said the cause of the crash was still not clear.
The USA and Britain have said the cause was likely a bomb planted on the flight, and Russian Federation has halted flights to Egypt until security at airports is improved.
A government source also said the rocket was not thought to have come as close as the report suggested.
But if a few of the intelligence is Israeli in origin, it could be an impediment to intelligence sharing over the crash. That’s prompted questions about the claim among a few observers, considering ISIS’ tendency to often publicize its acts for propaganda value.
The official said British passengers would check in their luggage as usual but it would be transported separately on a different plane.
One official said it was “99.9% certain”.
While US and United Kingdom officials have said there may have a bomb aboard the jet, the chief of Egypt’s investigation said authorities have not reached any conclusion yet as to what brought down the flight.
But officials in Washington and London don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle at their disposal.
The Egyptians aren’t the only ones involved.
A Metrojet Airbus A321-200 crashed 23 minutes after takeoff from the Sharm el-Sheikh airport in Egypt on October 31, killing all 224 people on board, mostly Russian tourists.
Lead investigator Ayman al-Muqaddam announced on Saturday that the plane appeared to have broken up in mid-air while it was being flown on auto-pilot, and that a noise had been heard in the last second of the cockpit recording.
The investigators said the cockpit voice recorder indicates an explosion, and the flight data recorder shows the blast was not accidental, according to France 2, a CNN affiliate.
Muqaddam, however, was more circumspect in his comments Saturday on the contents of the flight recorders.
“A noise was heard in the last second” on the voice recorder, he said, adding: “A spectral analysis will be carried out by specialized labs in order to identify the nature of this sound”.
“The Egyptian friends have undertaken first steps, the military control all procedures of registration for flights, they are at the airport in Sharm el-Sheikh, at other airports and they are minimising the lack of control, which, as tourists say, earlier was seen at a few airports; we can see the goodwill of our friends, colleagues to exclude life or security threats”, he said.
Following in Britain’s footsteps, Russian Federation said tourists returning home would fly without their check-in luggage which will be brought back to the country separately.
“Maybe it’s a lithium battery, maybe it’s an explosion, maybe it’s… a mechanical issue”, he said the possible cause of the crash. In Sharm el-Sheikh, the selective use of the scanner is even more arbitrary, three officials said. “The planes are flying there empty and come back with passengers on board”, Tyurina said.
There was no overall figure for how many tourists had been brought home since the Friday announcement that Russian Federation was suspending new passenger flights to Egypt because of security concerns.
He says “we expected that the information available would be communicated to us instead of being broadcast” in the media.
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“We came to the service today with all our family to support the people in our common grief”, said Galina Stepanova, 58.
