Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee said on Saturday that its experts were continuing their work at the crash site together with representatives of Egypt, France, Germany and Ireland.
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An A321 passenger jet of Russia’s Kogalymavia air carrier (flight 9268) bound to St. Petersburg crashed on October 31 a few 30 minutes after the takeoff from Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh.
Tunisia’s government is increasing security measures at airports and on airplanes after last month’s crash of a Russian airliner over Egypt, amid mounting suspicion that it could have been downed by a bomb.
The United Kingdom has handed over to Moscow certain data on the Russian plane crash over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, TASS reports. Speaking at the Dubai Airshow, Clark said he had ordered a security review, but was not suspending any flights as a result of the disaster.
Only an analysis of the wreckage could determine if a bomb caused the crash, Hammond said.
The possibility that Islamic State operatives were able to infiltrate Sharm al-Sheikh Airport and plant a bomb aboard a commercial aircraft has heightened worries among US officials about the danger posed by the group’s Sinai branch.
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. The industry had been making a gradual recovery after years of political upheaval since the 2011 popular uprising that deposed longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
Roughly three million Russian tourists came to Egypt in 2014, almost a third of all visitors, with most heading to the resorts in the southern Sinai Peninsula or its opposite coast, far off from an insurgency being fought by Islamic militants against the army further north.
Yaalon said he “would be surprised” if a planted explosive device did not cause the crash.
The Islamic State’s local affiliate, which calls itself the Sinai Province of Islamic State, claimed responsibility for the crash, and indicated it was in retaliation for Russia’s military intervention in the Syrian civil war. “The course of the operation against terrorists in Syria doesn’t depend on the investigation into the crash reason”, Ivanov said.
Commenting on media reports that Moscow was also mulling suspension of flights to other destinations in the Middle East, Ivanov said that Russian intelligence agencies have made no such advice, but added that Moscow was monitoring the general security situation and airport security in other countries in the region.
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After initially signalling normal air traffic would proceed, Russia late last week suspended passenger flights to Egypt. Over the weekend, Russia mounted an airlift to repatriate thousands of Russian vacationers who had been stranded in Sinai after regular flights were cancelled.
