Israeli intelligence provided ISIS intercepts in Russian plane crash case

Phillip Hammond, British Foreign Secretary, said Sunday his government believes it is “more likely than not” that an explosive device brought down the plane.

Investigators of the Russian plane crash in Egypt are “90 per cent sure” the noise heard in the final second of a cockpit recording was an explosion caused by a bomb, a member of the investigation team says.

Russian president Vladmir Putin suspended all flights from the country to Egypt until the cause of the crash was determined.

Flight 9268 was headed to St. Petersburg, Russian Federation from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt when it crashed just after takeoff, killing all 224 passengers aboard.

An Airbus A-321 carrying 224 people, majority Russian tourists, crashed in the Sinai Peninsula as it was returning from the Egyptian resort area of Sharm el-Sheikh to Saint Petersburg on 31 October.

Meanwhile thousands of Britons remain stranded in Sharm el-Sheikh as strict security measures at the resort’s airport have delayed flights to bring them home from their holidays.

But unnamed security officials at Sharm el-Sheikh airport, where the doomed Russian airliner took off, told the Associated Press that security was lacking in many areas.

Answering a question whether Russia sees any progress in the investigation of the Russian plane crash, he said “it was premature to talk about this, there have been no official statements yet about even a few preliminary results from the investigators”.

The Islamic State-affiliated Sinai Province, which claimed it brought the plane down, said it acted in revenge for Russian air strikes against Islamist fighters in Syria. Militants of the Islamic State terror group in the Sinai Peninsula have claimed that they downed the plane, and Mr McLoughlin said there was now a “high probability” that a bomb in the hold was to blame.

“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”, Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has received classified briefings on the investigation, said Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week”.

“I think there’s a growing body of intelligence and evidence that this was a bomb – still not conclusive – but a growing body of evidence”, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week”. Among the passengers onboard were also four Ukrainian citizens and one Belarusian national.

In a visit scheduled before the crash, a team from the worldwide Civil Aviation Organization inspected Cairo’s global airport on Monday, with the checks expected to include security and baggage handling.

“In the near future, flights which should have flown to Egypt are being redirected to Antalya”, the Interfax news agency quoted union spokeswoman Irina Turina as saying.