‘Airport security will need to be overhauled’

There was frustration at the resort’s airport, with a logjam of about 3,000 British passengers waiting to be repatriated while Russian tourists were fast-tracked home.

“A plane with 186 passengers, including 42 children, onboard has landed at the airport”, Major General Oleg Grebenyuk, the head of the Emergencies Ministry department for the Volgograd region, told journalists.

The Russian Airbus A321 operated by the Russian airline Kogalymavia crashed en route from Egypt’s resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg.

The officials told The Associated Press on Saturday that authorities were questioning airport staff and ground crew who worked on the Russian flight and had placed a few employees under surveillance.

The British government and USA officials have said intelligence suggests the plane was downed by a bomb, but Egypt says there’s still no confirmation of what caused the crash.

An unexplained noise during the final second of cockpit audio recordings has drawn attention, but Egypt’s chief investigator, Ayman al-Muqaddam, said his team could not immediately determine whether it was from an explosion or something else.

“We have no such data”. “We expected that the technical information available would be provided to us instead of being broadcast in the media in this general way”.

Russia’s ban on flights to Egypt won’t be lifted quickly amid concerns over security following the air crash that killed 224 people, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said.

Islamic State extremists have claimed that they brought down the Russian Metrojet that crashed in the Sinai on October 31, killing all 224 on board.

As was reported, representatives of the Belavia security service and management held working meetings with the top officials of the Sharm el-Sheikh global airport, representatives of the Egyptian intelligence services, the police and the army.

Shortcomings were found in the screening of both passengers and checked baggage, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the airport assessments were not public.

However, as the Times points out, Egyptian authorities were also hard to work with during the investigation into the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 off the coast of MA in 1999, and the two countries have still never agreed about what happened to that flight. In Sharm el-Sheikh, the selective use of the scanner is even more arbitrary.

The group has been fighting the Egyptian army in the Sinai, most of which is a closed military zone, in a conflict that human rights groups say has claimed thousands of civilian lives. US 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.

The extreme security now in place at the Sharm el-Sheikh airport will soon be relaxed, however airlines and tour operators expect there to be a severe decline in sales for holidays to the resort.

Talks between the United States, Egypt and Russian Federation could result in the FBI providing a few experts, particularly bomb technicians, to assist in the investigation, according to a USA official.

He said nothing about the theory that a terrorist bomb brought down the plane, an explanation that has been endorsed by Britain and that President Obama has said he is taking “very seriously”.

Security concerns over Egyptian procedures have also gained attention in recent days.