CAIRO — A noise was heard in the last second of the cockpit voice recording from the Russian plane that crashed last week in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the head of the joint investigation team said Saturday, bolstering U.S. and British suspicions that the plane was brought down by a bomb.
However, Ayman el-Muqadem warned it was too early to say what caused the plane to apparently break up in midflight. Analysis of the noise was underway.
“All scenarios are being considered. … It could be lithium batteries in the luggage of one of the passengers, it could be an explosion in the fuel tank, it could be fatigue in the body of the aircraft, it could be the explosion of something,” said El-Muqadem, who is Egyptian and leading the investigation committee that includes experts from Russia, France, Germany and Ireland, where the plane was registered. El-Muqadem appeared alone at the news conference in Cairo.
U.S. and British officials have cited intelligence reports as indicating that the Oct. 31 flight from the Sinai resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg was brought down by a bomb on board. All 224 people on board, most of them Russian tourists, were killed.
Islamic State extremists claimed they brought down the Metrojet flight, without offering proof, saying it was in retaliation for Moscow’s airstrikes that began a month earlier against fighters in Syria.
El-Muqadem said debris was found scattered across an 8-mile stretch of desert, indicating the Airbus A321-200 broke up mid-air, but initial observations don’t shed light on what caused it. Some pieces of wreckage were still missing, while the recovered pieces will be taken to Cairo for analysis, he said.
Egyptian airport and security officials told The Associated Press on Saturday that authorities were questioning airport staff and ground crew who worked on the plane and had placed some employees under surveillance. The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Also Saturday, Egypt’s foreign minister complained that Western governments had not sufficiently helped Egypt in its war on terrorism.
Egypt’s past calls for assistance and coordination on terrorism issues from “the countries that are now facing the danger” had not been dealt with seriously, Sameh Shoukry told a news conference. “European countries did not give us the cooperation we are hoping for,” he said.
Shoukry also said countries that have suspended flights to Sharm el-Sheikh — which include the U.K. and Russia, although the foreign minister did not specifically name them — did not share the intelligence that drove their decisions with Cairo. Egypt “expected that the information available would be communicated to us instead of being broadcast” in the media, he said.
Russia announced Friday it was suspending flights to all of Egypt, joining the UK and Ireland, which had stopped flights to Sharm el-Sheikh. At least a half-dozen Western European governments told their citizens not to travel there.
