The Ministry of Defense said Sunday that it has sent two Il-76 cargo planes to Egypt to bring back larger luggage the Russians had to leave behind.
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In London, Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said that a bomb in the hold of the Metrojet plane was “a high probability”.
British and USA officials, guided primarily by intelligence intercepts and satellite imagery, suggested a bomb might have been aboard the aircraft. The announcement was made as European investigators said evidence recovered from the airplane’s black boxes evidence the crash was not an accident.
Peskov denied that Russian Federation now accepted terrorism was the most likely cause of the loss of the Metrojet flight which came down on Saturday, 23 minutes after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh, with the loss of all 224 people on board.
Speaking at a press conference after meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi addressed the British government’s suspension of all flights from Sharm El-Sheikh, saying, “We understood their concern because they are really interested in the safety and security of their nationals”.
The investigators said the cockpit voice recorder indicates an explosion, and the flight data recorder confirms the explosion was not accidental, and there was no sign of mechanical malfunction during the initial part of the flight, France 2 reported.
One man told me he would have liked President Vladimir Putin to be there, since Mr Putin is a native of St Petersburg.
The Russian Travel Industry Union said almost all Russian tourists due to visit Egypt in the coming days had agreed to fly to Turkey instead.
The cause of the crash of the Russian jet, which could be the result of an explosive on board, a catastrophic mechanical failure, human error or an accidental explosion of fuel, remains a mystery.
He added that Russian Federation was sending a number of experts to inspect Egypt’s airports to see if security needed to be beefed up there.
Egyptian officials have said that the suggestion that a bomb had brought down the plane was not based on facts from their investigation.
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Russia had previously resisted the theory that a bomb brought down the airliner, possibly because any terrorist bombing of a Russian plane could be seen as retaliation for Putin’s decision to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and launch airstrikes against the terrorist group ISIS and other Assad opponents.
