Suspicion of Russian cover up over deadly Egypt plane crash

MAXIM GRIGORYEV/AFP/Getty Images An “external force” is no longer to blame for the deadly crash that killed 224 people on board a Russian passenger plane, a source close to the investigation said.

“We rule out technical faultiness of the plane, we exclude a mistake by the pilot or the crew, the so-called human factor”, he said.

Safety experts say failures from such episodes are extremely rare, but there have been two major accidents blamed on poor tail repairs carried out up to two decades earlier, including the world’s deadliest single-jetliner disaster in Japan. “This explains why they didn’t attempt to contact air traffic and report the incident happening on board”.

Smirnov said the Metrojet charter flight “received significant damage to its construction that did not allow it to continue the flight”.

“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. Most of the passengers were Russian nationals. Three Ukrainians were also among the dead.

He said the aircraft’s engines had undergone routine inspection in Moscow on October 26 which found no problems and he said in the five flights before the crash, the crew recorded no technical problems in the aircraft’s log book.

The first 10 bodies of victims of Saturday’s plane crash over Egypt were identified by their families Tuesday, a string of tearful relatives leaving the city crematorium.

Mr Cameron, who spoke yesterday with Russian president Vladimir Putin about the crash, added: “If anything changes, we don’t sit around and chew our pens and not act”. However, another Pentagon official told ABC News that the heat flash may not be related to the crash since the Sinai Peninsula is a volatile place with regular military activity.

That’s despite the fact that extremists associated with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have claimed responsibility for shooting down the jet, killing all 224 people onboard. Militants in the area are not believed to have antiaircraft weapons capable of hitting a plane at 9,100 meters, the altitude at which the plane was cruising. An adviser to Egypt’s aviation minister denied the report.

The plane was flying at 31,000 feet when it crashed just 23 minutes after takeoff. However, on Monday, Reuters reported that the plane was not struck from the outside and the pilot did not make a distress call before it disappeared from radar.