Sinai plane crash: IS claims ‘propaganda’, says Egypt president

Deputy director general of Kogalymavia airline company, also known as Metrojet, Alexander Smirnov attends a press conference in Moscow on November 2, 2015.

Russian officials said that a second plane was set to repatriate more bodies later Monday evening, but did not say how many.

Russian news agencies on Tuesday quoted Igor Albin as saying that that the families of the victims identified the bodies.

The Airbus 321 is thought to have broken up in mid-air over the Sinai peninsula on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board.

The executive was not specific about what he meant by an external influence.

According to the former military chief who spoke in an interview with the BBC; “when there is propaganda that it crashed because of ISIS, this is one way to damage the stability and security of Egypt and the image of Egypt”, Sisi said, using an alternative acronym for ISIL.

Technical failure and human error did not cause Flight 7K9268 to crash, say senior officials at Metrojet.

“What the Egyptian affiliate of IS has achieved is that it has shaped the narrative about what happened to the plane”, said Professor Fawaz Gerges from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“In the recordings, sounds uncharacteristic of a standard flight precede the moment of the airliner’s disappearance from radar screens”, the news service reported without elaboration.

In Washington, the director of USA national intelligence, James Clapper, said he has not been made aware of any direct evidence of terrorist involvement.

Analysis of the black box recorders, which could solve the mystery of what brought down the plane, is expected to begin on Tuesday according to Egyptian officials.

Kamal says the committee – which includes Egyptian and Russian experts as well as representatives from Ireland, where the Metrojet’s Airbus A321-200 was registered – will conclude its last field inspection at the crash site by the end of the day Tuesday and start working on the black boxes. On the other hand preliminary reports indicate that the aircraft broke apart mid-air raising speculation that perhaps a bomb may have been involved.

The ex-wife of the plane’s copilot, Sergei Trukhachev, said over the weekend that he had told his daughter he was concerned about the condition of the plane. “Our daughter had a telephone chat with him just before the flight”, Natalya Trukhacheva told Russia’s state-run NTV.

A USA military satellite detected a midair heat flash from the Russian airliner before the plane crashed Saturday, a US official told CNN. The aircraft had clocked around 56,000 flight hours over the course of almost 21,000 flights, the plane maker said.

Almost all the passengers were Russian tourists. The citizenships of three other passengers are unknown.

A few theories on social media speculated that a bomb had been aboard the doomed plane, but as yet there has been no proof to back that claim. Sharm el-Sheikh has been a rare bright spot for tourism in the country, largely insulated from the region’s chaos of the past few years.

Speaking out… Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said ISIS is not responsible for downing the Russian het.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had declared Sunday a day of mourning, said on Monday the crash was a great tragedy.

Airport and ground staff at Sharm El-Sheikh’s airport will be investigated, Civil Aviation Ministry spokesman Mohammed Rahma said in e- mailed response to questions. Among the details investigators could uncover: Information about the plane’s air speed, altitude, engine performance and wing positions. The vicious conflict has killed hundreds of people. The Russian Airbus A321 passenger plane went down in Sinai, Egypt, less than 30 minutes after taking off for St. Petersburg.

The claim by Sinai Province “is credible”, said Mathieu Guidere, a terrorism expert at the University of Toulouse in France.

However, the act of terrorism has not been ruled out officially by investigators.