by admin | May 25, 2021 | Media, News
CAIRO, (ARAB NEWS): Search crews found human remains, luggage and passenger seats Friday from the EgyptAir jetliner that fell out of the sky over the Mediterranean Sea, as investigators tried to determine whether the disaster was the work of terrorists.
With no bodies to bury yet, relatives and friends of some of the 66 people on board held special prayers in mosques for the victims.
But the mystery remained over why the Airbus A320 — which had been cruising normally in clear skies on a nighttime flight from Paris to Cairo early Thursday — suddenly lurched left, then right, and plummeted into the sea, never issuing a distress signal.
Egyptian authorities said they believe it may have been an act of terrorism, as have Russian officials and some aviation experts, but so far no hard evidence has emerged.
No militant group has claimed to have brought down the aircraft.
Three European security officials said the passenger manifest for EgyptAir Flight 804 contained no names on terrorism watch lists. The manifest was leaked online and has not been verified by the airline.
French aviation investigators have begun to check and question all baggage handlers, maintenance workers, gate agents and other ground crew members at Paris’ Charles De Gaulle Airport who had a direct or indirect link to the plane before it took off.
Experts said answers will come only with examination of the wreckage and the plane’s black box recorders. But retrieving them may take time. The water is 8,000 to 10,000 feet deep in the area where the jetliner is thought to have gone down, roughly halfway between Egypt’s coastal city of Alexandria and the Greek island of Crete.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News
CAIRO: An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo carrying 59 passengers and 10 crew disappeared from radar early Thursday morning, the airline said.
The Airbus A320 most likely crashed into the sea, Ihab Raslan, a spokesman for the Egyptian civil aviation agency, told SkyNews Arabia.
He said the plane was about to enter Egyptian airspace when it disappeared from radar. The airline, however, said it had vanished 10 miles (16 kilometres) after it entered Egyptian airspace.
EgyptAir Flight 804 was lost from radar at 2:45am local time, the airline said. An inspection was underway to find the airplane, which was at a height of 37,000 feet when it disappeared, it added.
The Paris airport authority and the French civil aviation authority would not immediately comment.
An EgyptAir plane was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus in March. A man who admitted to the hijacking and is described by Cypriot authorities as “psychologically unstable” is in custody in Cyprus.
The incident renewed security concerns months after a Russian passenger plane was blown out of the sky over the Sinai Peninsula. The Russian plane crashed in Sinai on Oct 31, killing all 224 people on board.
Moscow said it was brought down by an explosive device, and a local branch of the militant Islamic State (IS) group has claimed responsibility for planting it.
In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 1990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, killing all 217 people aboard, US investigators filed a final report that concluded its co-pilot switched off the autopilot and pointed the Boeing 767 downward. But Egyptian officials rejected the notion of suicide altogether, insisting some mechanical reason caused the crash.
(reference:http://www.dawn.com)
