But the official added that there has not been a formal conclusion reached by the USA intelligence community on the cause of the crash.
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“So far, then, this has not been a Russian fight against terrorism so much as an effort to preserve the Assad regime”, she said.
The Sinai-based group “Sinai State” that had announced loyalty to the IS said in a statement posted on Twitter that its militants managed to target the Russian plane and killed all its passengers.
He told CNN he was “somewhat surprised” by the British statement.
The experts hope the examination of the recorded onboard conversations as well as flight data will help provide clues as to what caused the crash. It is certainly possible that it was an explosive, but it’s also possible that this was a structural problem with the plane. “With the tail section of the plane”, he said.
“So at this point, I don’t think we’re prepared to draw any conclusions”.
Experts say the probe into the crash will take time as they analyse recovered black boxes and wreckage that was strewn across a wide area.
The Sinai affiliate for ISIS was originally named Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, later changed to Wilayat Sinai.
However, Britain made no mention of any group that may have been responsible.
The Metrojet Airbus 321 was heading to St. Petersburg, Russian Federation and it took off from Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh airport. On Wednesday, it claimed responsibility for a suicide auto bombing on a police social club in El-Arish, which the official MENA news agency said killed four policemen.
Unnamed United States intelligence sources reported that a bomb was now the likeliest explanation for the destruction of the Metrojet flight on Saturday, which appeared to have blown apart in mid-air.
After a meeting of the British government’s crisis committee, COBRA, Hammond said Britain was advising its citizens not to go on vacation to Sharm el-Sheikh, which is visited by hundreds of thousands of Britons a year.
“We’ve looked at the whole information picture, including that claim, but of course lots of other bits of information as well, and concluded there is a significant possibility”, Hammond said in response to a question about whether he thought “IS” militants were behind the disaster.
Peskov said Russian planes were continuing to fly to and from Sharm elSheikh Airport in Egypt, despite Ireland and Britain suspending flights.
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20,000 British tourists stranded in Sharm el-Sheikh ” These are special additional measures, not necessarily something that we could do on a sustainable basis but something that we will put in as a short term special measure to get back home the people who are there now”, Hammond said.
