ISIS releases image of ‘Russian plane bomb’

ISIS has said it smuggled a bomb on board a Russian airliner that crashed last month, after discovering a “way to compromise the security” at an Egyptian airport.

The latest edition of its official online magazine Dabiq said IS had initially planned to down a plane belonging to a country from the US-led coalition targeting militants in Iraq and Syria.

As for the deadly attacks in France, the ISIS magazine says that the terrorist group had not forgotten that French airstrikes against Islamic State militants began on September 19, 2014, in Iraq.

Russian-language daily Kommersant said earlier today citing an unnamed source close to the investigation of the crash that the bomb had been planted by Sharm El-Sheikh Airport personnel under the passenger seat.

“To bring down an airplane, you don’t need to blow it apart, you just need enough to rupture the pressure hull of the aircraft, and the air pressure will do the work for you”, he said.

The Kogalymavia A321 air crash took place over the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt on October 31.

The Kremlin said, in the same statement, that Putin told Sisi about Russia’s intensified combat operations against extremist groups in Syria. The IS affiliate in Sinai has stepped up its campaign against Egyptian authorities, killing hundreds of security personnel, since the 2013 military-led ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi. Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed this week that the plane was brought down by a bomb.

The Sinai bombing, together with last week’s attacks in Paris, have pushed Russian Federation and Western nations toward joint action in Syria, overcoming a history of disagreement over who to support in the civil war.

“Attacking one of Assad’s primary backers helps improve the group’s domestic image” against accusations that it is not fighting the regime, he said.

If the group had indeed placed a bomb on board of the plane, in the heavily secured resort, it would cast doubts on aviation security in Egypt and perhaps other countries.