Airbus confident in safety of its A321 planes

GCHQ, the Government’s secret listening centre, picked up “chatter” from extremist groups in Egypt immediately after the Russian plane came down.

A noise was heard in the last second of the cockpit voice recording from the Russian plane that crashed last week in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the head of the joint investigation team said Saturday.

“The tasks for experts are: are there traces of explosives on the debris, and if yes, which explosives?” one source was quoted as saying.

In an apparent reference to the bomb theory, al-Muqaddam said that a few media reports “claimed to be based on official intelligence that favors a certain scenario for the cause of the accident” and that Egypt had not been provided with that information.

Reps. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) say new evidence nearly certainly indicates the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) brought down a Russian passenger plane.

The United States has announced it is stepping up security screening of items on US-bound flights from a few airports in the Middle East. The Homeland Security statementdid not say which airports it was targeting.

The Airbus A321 crashed 23 minutes after taking off from the Sharm al-Sheikh tourist resort eight days ago, killing all 224 passengers and crew.

It added: “These flights will operate under special security measures mandated by the UK Government”.

Egyptian militants affiliated to the Islamic State who are fighting Egyptian security forces in Sinai Peninsula, have claimed responsibility for bringing down the airplane but have not revealed how they had done this.

The bell of the iconic St. Isaac’s Cathedral tolled 224 times in memory of each person killed.

And in another statement on the crash, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry complained that Egyptian authorities haven’t been provided with foreign intelligence related to the crash.

Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he shares King’s assessment of the evidence and thinks that ISIS “may have concluded that the best way to defeat airport defenses is not to go through them but to go around them with the help of somebody on the inside”. Nonetheless, security fears have prompted Russian Federation to suspend all flights to Egypt and Britain to halt air travel to Sharm el-Sheikh, while several other countries have warned their nationals not to fly to the resort.

British attempts to airlift home thousands of holidaymakers on Friday were mired in confusion when Egypt restricted the number of flights, citing capacity limits at Sharm el-Sheikh airport and British airliners’ refusal to hold passenger luggage in the cargo bay.