Egypt will not rush the ongoing investigation into the cause of the biggest civil aviation disaster in Russian history, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi said Wednesday.
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Casson visited Sharm el-Sheikh airport as British tourists were evacuated, and was filmed being rebuked by an angry holidaymaker who wanted to leave the country.
Gevara Mohamed Eljafi, Head of the Tourism Chamber of South Sinai: “For example, [every year] we had one million, one hundred and five thousand Russian tourists, we had 495,000 British tourists and we had also, around 400,000 tourists from different nationalities”.
Sisi echoed that message during his visit to Sharm al-Sheikh.
Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia) said on Thursday it planned to increase the frequency of its flights from the kingdom to the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh from February 2016.
An Egyptian member of the global team investigating the crash last week told Reuters that they were “90% sure” that a sound heard in the last moments of the recording of the plane’s cockpit voice recorder was an explosion caused by a bomb.
Battered by years of political turmoil, Egypt’s vital tourism sector has been nearly completely dependent on Russian and European tourists visiting Sharm el-Sheikh and other Red Sea resorts.
Sinai Province, a local militant movement affiliated with the Islamic State (IS) terror organization has claimed responsibility for bringing down the plane.
“Egypt has notified all countries with the right to participate in the investigation, including the American National Transportation Safety Board since the company that produced the plane engine is American”, Abu Zeid said.
The remaining Russian holidaymakers are leaving the Sharm el-Sheikh resort with only hand luggage aboard special flights, with their suitcases sent on separate planes. Russian tour operators have lost 1.5 billion rubles – about $23 million – since flights were suspended November 6, The Moscow Times reported.
Egypt and Russian Federation have called for patience as the formal crash probe unfolds.
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Even before the jet crash, Egypt’s tourism industry was in the doldrums due to the unrest, which has gripped the country since the 2011 uprising that forced longtime autocrat Hosny Mubarak out of power. While the Kremlin initially said it had not concluded there was terrorist involvement in the crash, the government’s decision to suspend flights was seen as an acknowledgement of security concerns in the area.
