An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo with 56 passengers and ten crew crashed into the Mediterranean on Thursday, apparently killing everyone on board, and raising fears that it was a terrorist attack. The plane had taken off from Charles de Gaulle (CDG) Airport in France, and apparently crashed soon after it entered Egyptian airspace.
Among the passengers were 30 Egyptians, 15 French, two Iraqis and one each from several countries including the UK, Belgium, Kuwait and Canada. Signs of possible wreckage were found off the island of Crete, about twelve hours after the crash. The objects were pieces of plastic in white and red and were spotted close to an area where the transponder signal had been emitted.
Egyptian officials said it was too early to tell if the crash was an accident or terrorism, but that terrorism seems more likely. The Airbus A320 was relatively new and known as a safe aircraft.
“If you analysis the situation properly the possibility of having a terror attack is higher than the possibility of having a technical [problem],” Minister of Civil Aviation Sherif Fathy told reporters in Cairo.
Fathy also corrected an early report that said that signal was heard two hours after the flight disappeared from radar.
“There was a mistake made by an official somewhere,” he said. “He talked about a signal and then a few minutes after he came back and apologized, and he came back and said ‘sorry there was no signal’. After his first statement we all went to the press and said the signal was received, thereafter we denied that and we admit there was a mistake that happened.”
The head of Russia’s domestic intelligence agency said he believes the plane was brought down by a terror attack “in all likelihood.”
Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Federal Security Service, called for governments to come together to track down those responsible for the “monstrous attack.”
The crash comes after an Airbus A321 operated by Russia’s Metrojet crashed in the Sinai desert last October killing all 224 people on board. Russia said the plane was most likely brought down by a bomb, and the Islamic State said it had smuggled an explosive device on board.
Reuters later reported that an EgyptAir mechanic, whose cousin joined Islamic State in Syria, was most likely the one who placed the bomb.
In this case, there was no claim of responsibility 12 hours after the plane disappeared. There were no weather disturbances reported, and a British pilot who had been flying in the same area told the BBC that there were no communications problems and the weather was “perfect.”
Even if the crash is eventually ruled an accident, it could have further affect tourism in Egypt. Until the Arab spring protests in 2011, Egypt attracted 15 million visitors a year. That number was down to nine million in 2014, according to Egyptian government figures. So far this year, the numbers are down even further, after the UK and other states warned there was a serious risk of terrorism in Sinai, where the Russian airliner exploded.
“This incident will further damage Egypt’s tourism industry,” Israeli terrorism expert Shlomo Brom of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University told The Media Line. “It will also be a blow to the prestige of EgyptAir as it may show that its security arrangements are not good enough.”
Brom said, however, that as the flight originated in Paris, it is the French government that should be responsible for security.
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