Egypt’s president has made a surprise visit of the Sharm el-Sheikh airport, seeking to reassure tourists that the vacation destination is safe.
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The Metrojet plane crashed in the Sinai peninsula shortly after take-off en route to St Petersburg on 31 October.
Representatives for the FBI said that the bureau had offered both Egyptian and Russian crash investigators forensic assistance and other investigative help, but as of Thursday its offers had not been accepted.
“We are endeavouring to process as many people as possible through the airport as safely and quickly as we can”, it said.
An insurgency in Sinai had bedeviled the country since Islamist President Mohamed Morsi’s overthrow, which unleashed a crackdown that killed hundreds of his supporters.
The travel restrictions will have a devastating affect on tourism, one of the country’s key revenue earners.
Security officials at Sharm el-Sheikh airport told The Associated Press there have always been security gaps there, including a key baggage scanning device that often is not functioning and lax searches at an entry gate for food and fuel for the planes.
Since then suspicions that a bomb brought down the airliner, killing all on board, as it flew out of Sharm el-Sheikh airport, have seen all flights to and from Russian Federation halted, as well as those from several major western European countries.
“The people defy the conspiracy – Egypt will not cave in to pressures”, the state-owned Al-Gomhuria newspaper proclaimed in a front-page headline this week.
A spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said the agency received its first formal request for information Wednesday from Egyptian authorities about the continuing probe.
Suspension of the flights is estimated to cost Egypt around $281m a month, Egyptian Tourism Minister Hesham Zazou said on Wednesday. Before flights were suspended, Egyptian resorts had about 79,000 Russian people staying in them, the Association of Russian Tour Operators Vice President Dmitry Gorin told Russian media outlets Monday.
The company said: “Thomson Airways has worked closely with the United Kingdom government to finalise our flying programme for customers in Sharm el-Sheikh”.
She praised the Government for stopping Brits travelling to Egypt, saying: “David Cameron gets a few things wrong but I think he got this right”.
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One of the dwindling backbones of Egypt’s tourism industry had been Russian tourists.
