Did a bomb bring down Metrojet Flight 9268?
Metrojet was carrying holidaymakers from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg when it crashed into a mountainous area of central Sinai shortly after losing radar contact near cruising altitude.
Parts of the wreckage were blackened and charred, with one section forming heaps of twisted metal, although the blue Metrojet logo was still visible on its broken tail fin.
As the Russian investigators moved slowly across the site, Egyptian military helicopters buzzed overhead, combing the wider area for debris – or bodies – not yet found.
A Sinai-based Egyptian militant group allied to Islamic State claimed on Saturday to have shot down the plane in response to Russia’s military intervention in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad against rebels including Islamic State.
However, the militants are not believed to have missiles capable of hitting a plane at 30,000 feet. A source in the committee analysing the flight recorders told Reuters on Monday that the plane had not been struck from the outside. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday it was inappropriate to link the crash to Russia’s military strategy in Syria.
“The destruction happened in the air, and fragments were scattered over a large area of around 20 square kilometres,” said Viktor Sorochenko, director of the Intergovernmental Aviation Committee. However, he warned against reading anything into this information. “It’s too early to talk about conclusions,” he said on Russian television from Cairo.
The Moscow-based committee represents governments of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which groups Russia and other former Soviet republics.
Egyptian analysts began examining the contents of the two “black box” recorders recovered from the airliner although the process, according to a civil aviation source, could take days. However, Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov told Russia 24 television that this work had not yet started.
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