Russian ban on flights to Egypt will last months

Moscow has banned all flights to Egypt for at least several months, a severe blow for the tourism industry during the peak season for Russian visitors.

Neither the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) nor the FBI have been invited to join the Egyptian-led investigation into the crash of a Russian airliner in the Sinai Peninsula late last month, officials at the two US agencies said on Thursday.

“The lights will not be going out in Sharm el-Sheikh or Hurghada while we are here”, Sisi told reporters.

Moscow has said its ban on flights is necessary because of concerns about security at Egypt’s airports.

But there is enough other evidence to have convinced USA and British officials to go with the bomb theory.

Speaking to press on Wednesday, Kremlin administration head Sergei Ivanov explained that “to fundamentally change the system of safety, security and monitoring is impossible to do in only a week and even in a month”.

It has been waging an insurgency in Sinai, but had so far focused its battle against security forces in the north of the peninsula, hundreds of kilometres from Sharm el-Sheikh on its southern tip.

The Russian ban has badly struck Egypt’s vital tourist sector, which represents 11 per cent of its economy and nearly 20 per cent of crucial foreign currency revenues. The industry had been making a gradual recovery after years of political upheaval since the 2011 popular uprising that deposed longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Eastern European visitors, including people from former Soviet satellite states like Ukraine, made up 45 per cent of all tourist arrivals in June.

Sinai Province, an affiliate of the hardline Islamic State group, says it brought down the plane.

“To be honest, we stopped flights to Egypt, not knowing the final version (of the crash), but we did this as a preventative measure, as a precaution”, he said.

He added that Russia’s air campaign in Syria will continue regardless of the probe.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that the global organisations’ regulations regarding the investigation “allow countries that manufactured the plane or the engines, or that registered the plane, in addition to the country where the plane crashed to participate in the investigation”.

El-Sissi said authorities have carried out regular checks on all airports over the past few months, and that other countries had been involved in the inspections.

The remains of a Russian airliner are seen as rescue crews wait at the crash site in al-Hasanah in El Arish, Egypt, November 1, 2015.