International teams inspect security at Cairo airport

El-Sissi said authorities have carried out regular checks on all airports over the past few months, and that other countries had been involved in the inspections.

“As we speak, we’re reviewing our procedures in terms of security and ramp handling and access to our aircraft”, Clark said.

But he said it was too soon to draw conclusions about why the plane crashed. U.S. investigators have not been invited to visit the crash site, and while the Russian government has asked the FBI for help, it is not known how much information Moscow has shared with the bureau.

Still, the Foreign Office is advising against “all but essential travel by air” to or from the Red Sea destination because of the “significant possibility” that the Russian Metrojet crash was caused by an explosive device.

Russia flew thousands of tourists home from Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday and Sunday, as the first of three Russian inspection teams headed to the region to examine airport security.

Britain has also started flying out a few of the 20,000 of its nationals estimated to have been in Sharm el-Sheikh at the time of the crash.

More than 25 000 Russian tourists have left the country since the flight ban was implemented.

Investigators are understood to be 90% sure a noise picked up by the cockpit voice recorder in the final seconds of the flight was the sound of the explosion caused by a bomb.

The Sinai affiliate of the Islamic State claimed responsibility for bringing down the passenger flight, saying it was in retaliation for Russian airstrikes on rebels in Syria’s civil war.

Egypt’s Foreign Affairs spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said Saturday that both governments were “fully aware that plane was in no danger” during military training near the Sharm el-Sheikh airpot.

A remembrance service was held in St Petersburg for the crash’s 224 victims, most of whom were Russian.

As a choir sang, the bell of the world’s fourth-largest cathedral was tolling one time for each of the 224 victims.

The head of Cairo’s worldwide airport, Maj.

Peskov, however, declined to elaborate what particular data he referred to, neither did he answer a reporter’s question whether the data had affected Russia’s decision to suspend all passenger flights to Egypt, TASS said.

Russian Federation has sent specialists to conduct a safety audit of Egypt’s airports and to provide recommendations on additional measures, said deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich.