Share

Russian Federation sends inspectors to examine Egypt airports

Stepanova said she believed that the plane was downed by a bomb, but said that Russian Federation should continue its airstrike campaign against the Islamic State group and other rebel factions in Syria.

Advertisement

Ben Khosravi, 27, who was on an easyJet flight that landed at Luton airport Friday, said security at Sharm el-Sheikh airport was “horrendous”.

Over the weekend, Russia mounted an airlift to repatriate thousands of Russian vacationers who had been stranded in Sinai after regular flights were canceled.

US experts say it is possible to determine if that noise was a bomb, and if so, where it was placed.

Several senior USA officials in the intelligence, military and national security community spoke with the network’s reporters and all confirmed the same thing: a bomb brought down the Russian plane with 224 people on board.

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his government last week to facilitate the repatriation of Russian travelers from Egypt. Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said Saturday that up to 80,000 Russians were visiting the country, twice as many as previously estimated.

A Russian investigator walks near wreckage a day after a passenger jet bound for St. Petersburg, Russia, crashed in Hassana, Egypt, on Sunday, November 1, 2015.

All 224 people on the board the Russian Metrojet flight from Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg died when it came down in Sinai on 31 October.

Lead investigator Ayman al-Muqaddam told a press conference on Saturday that the aircraft had broken up in mid-air while it was on autopilot, and that a noise could be heard in the last second of the cockpit black box recorder.

One of the black boxes recovered from the crash site showed that the plane suffered “a violent, sudden” end, a source close to the case in Paris told AFP.

Islamic State militants fighting Egyptian security forces in Sinai said they brought it down.

ISIS communications intercepted both before and after the crash suggest the terror group was in communication with someone at Sharm el-Sheikh, ABC News reported. He said structural fatigue, a fuel explosion and even lithium batteries carried by passengers could be a cause.

Advertisement

Egypt meanwhile has criticised its foreign partners for ignoring calls to work harder to combat terrorism after Western intelligence sources said there were signs Islamist militants may be behind the bombing.

Debris belonging to Flight KGL 9268 a Russian airliner lie strewn across the desert at its crash site near Wadi al-Zolomat a mountainous area in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula on Nov. 1