IS Sinai crash claims ‘propaganda’

The examination of the black boxes – one which recorded on-board conversations and the other flight data – will be carried out by a joint committee including Egyptian and Russian experts as well as representatives from Ireland, where the plane was registered.

US officials said it was “unlikely” that a terrorist group such as ISIS had shot down the plane but that they would not rule out the possibility.

On Tuesday morning, Russia’s Interfax news service, citing a source in the investigation, said there were no signs of a malfunction with the plane and that pilots were chatting normally with air-traffic controllers until four minutes before an “emergency situation occurred on board unexpectedly”.

“In such cases, leave it to specialists to determine the cause of the plane crash because it is a subject of an extensive and complicated technical study”, said President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi from Cairo.

Russia’s Metrojet, legally operated as Kogalymavia airline, killed all 224 passengers within the flight.

He said, “Without any doubt everything should be done so that an objective picture of what happened is created, so that we know what happened”.

The same person added “there is no evidence a missile of any kind brought down the plane”.

Debris of the A321 Russian airliner in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. And if that was the case, why haven’t investigators found signs of an explosive impact on the crash victims’ bodies, as Russian state media reports?

Wilayat Sinai, Islamic State’s affiliate in Egypt, claimed responsibility on Twitter for downing the Airbus A321 on Saturday as it flew from the coastal resort of Sharm el Sheik to St. Petersburg.

One area investigators will look at closely is whether the tail separated from the rest of the plane in-flight as the result of damage caused by a previous incident in which the tail struck the runway during a landing, said aviation safety consultant John Cox.

“The speculation that this plane was brought down by a missile is off the table”, the American defense official told NBC News.

His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, rejected any connection between the crash and the Russian military action in Syria, saying there is no reason to link them.

“We rule out a technical fault of the plane or a pilot error”, Kogalymavia airline executive Alexander Smirnov said in a press conference in Moscow on Monday, as quoted by The Guardian.

Mr Albin said identification of all of the victims could take several weeks.

President Vladimir Putin described the crash, Russia’s worst air disaster, as a “huge tragedy”.

As the investigation moved forward, more of the dead were brought to St. Petersburg.