| New York Times | - |
MOSCOW
- A Russian charter flight ferrying 224 passengers and crew to St.
Petersburg from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, crashed
soon after taking off early Saturday, killing everyone onboard,
officials in Egypt and Russia said.
Plane Passengers' Bodies Arrive in Cairo
As bodies of the Russian airliner
that crashed in the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday arrived in Cairo,
officials in Egypt and Russia discussed the investigation.
By REUTERS on Publish Date October 31, 2015.
Photo by Mohammed Hossam/European Pressphoto Agency.
Watch in Times Video »
MOSCOW
— A Russian charter flight ferrying 224 passengers and crew to St.
Petersburg from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, crashed
soon after taking off early Saturday, killing everyone onboard,
officials in Egypt and Russia said.
The
plane, an 18-year-old Airbus A321-200, disappeared from radar screens
about 25 minutes after it took off, according to official accounts.
Hossam Kamal, the Egyptian transportation minister, denied that anything
abnormal had happened before the plane disappeared. Earlier news
reports in Egypt, citing officials, said the pilot had radioed that he
was having technical difficulties and wanted to make an emergency
landing.
“Communications
between the pilot and the tower were very normal — no distress signals
occurred,” Mr. Kamal said at a news conference broadcast nationally. The
pilot did not request to change his route to make an emergency landing,
he said, emphasizing that “all was normal; the plane disappeared
suddenly off the radar without any prior warning.”
The
Egyptian government sent military crews and 50 ambulances to the crash
site in an area called Hasana, a mountainous region about 46 miles south
of El-Arish, the main city in the part of the Sinai Peninsula where the
crash occurred. The ambulances began taking the 129 bodies recovered to
military helicopters, senior officials said. All 224 people onboard the
plane died, the Russian Embassy in Cairo said in a brief statement on
Twitter.
Hours
after the crash, a branch of the Islamic State operating in Sinai
claimed responsibility. There has been no indication that the branch has
the kind of weapons needed to bring down a plane from a high altitude.
The other possibility would be a bomb planted or carried onboard. There
has been a violent insurgency in Sinai against the Egyptian government
for several years.
Egyptian
and Russian officials did not immediately confirm the cause of the
crash. The plane had apparently been trying to land at the airport at
El-Arish, in northern Sinai, when it crashed, spreading mangled wreckage
over a wide area of desert.
Maxim
Sokolov, the Russian transportation minister, issued a statement
rejecting reports that the plane had been the target of a terrorist
attack.
Mediterranean Sea
Nile Delta
GAZA
ISRAEL
El-Arish
SINAI
JORDAN
Last radar
contact
Cairo
Flight path
Wasit
EGYPT
SAUDI
ARABIA
Nile
Sharm el-Sheikh
50 Miles
Red Sea
Altitude data from flight
40,000 feet
20,000
0
Local time
05:52
05:56
06:00
06:04
06:08
06:12
500 knots (575 m.p.h.)
300 (345)
Speed data from flight
100 (115)
“This
information cannot be considered credible,” Mr. Sokolov said. “We are
in a close contact with our Egyptian colleagues, with the aviation
authorities of this country. At the moment, they have no information
that would confirm such fabrications.”
Air
France and Lufthansa said Saturday that they would avoid flying over
the Sinai Peninsula as a precaution until further notice. Lufthansa said
this would involve rerouting flights to six destinations.
The
plane was flying at 31,000 feet when it suddenly began to descend. The
general range of the shoulder-fired missiles, commonly known as Manpads,
that have been used against Egyptian military helicopters in the region
is much lower, around 20,000 feet.
Russian
officials emphasized that determining the cause of the crash would
require a technical analysis of the flight recorders and other work.
Investigators from both Russia and France will assist.
News
reports in Egypt quoted the first security officials who reached the
site as saying that the plane had broken in two and that many of the
passengers were still strapped into their seats.
Sherif
Ismail, the Egyptian prime minister, said at a news conference that the
flight recorder had been recovered, along with the bodies of 129
victims. Debris from the crash was spread over an area of at least four
miles, he said, and the security services continued to comb it.
Television footage showed ambulances backing up to a brown military transport helicopter and wrapped corpses being put on board.
An
Egyptian government statement said the plane had been carrying 217
passengers, including 17 children, and seven crew members. Everyone
onboard was Russian, most from the St. Petersburg region, except for
three passengers from Ukraine and one from Belarus.
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The
plane, Metrojet Flight 7K9268, left the airport in Sharm el-Sheikh
shortly before 6 a.m. and disappeared from radar screens at 6:20 a.m.
A
website called Flightradar24, which tracks air traffic around the
globe, said the plane had been descending at a rate of 6,000 feet per
minute just before it disappeared from radar.
In
St. Petersburg, friends and relatives who showed up at Pulkovo Airport
to meet the flight were shuttled to the nearby Crowne Plaza hotel. They
remained cordoned off in a corner of the lobby, awaiting developments. A
Russian Orthodox priest and at least one grief counselor circled among them.
Nina,
an elderly woman who gave only her first name, said she was waiting to
give a sample of her DNA, requested from all the relatives to help
identify the victims. “I saw the news on television, so I came,” she
said. Her son Alexei, 45, and his fiancée, Natasha, had been vacationing
in Egypt.
President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered the establishment of a state
commission to investigate the crash. The Russian government also sent a
plane from its emergency services to take a team of investigators to the
scene.
Mr.
Putin declared Sunday a day of mourning for the victims. Russian news
reports said the crash was the worst aviation disaster in Russian
history.
A
criminal investigation began with searches of the airline’s offices to
make sure the plane was in compliance with Russian safety standards,
according to a statement on the website of the Investigative Committee,
the main government agency for criminal inquiries.
The
plane was operated by Kogalymavia, which is privately owned and flies
planes under the name Metrojet. There was nothing remarkable about the
airline’s safety record, though the fuel tank on one of its planes
exploded before departure from the Siberian city of Surgut in 2011, and
the ensuing fire killed three people.
The airline issued a statement saying that the plane had been in good working order and in the hands of experienced pilots.
“In
2014, the airplane has undergone factory maintenance in accordance with
the factory specifications,” the statement said. “All requirements of
preflight technical maintenance were fulfilled in full and on time.”
Russian
news reports quoted unidentified sources as saying that the crew had
recently complained about problems with one of the two engines on the
plane that crashed, but there was no official confirmation.
The
sharp drop in the value of the ruble and tensions with the West over
the past year have sharply diminished the number of Russians traveling
abroad. But Egypt remained the No. 1 tourist destination for Russians
leaving the country in the first six months of 2015, with more than a
million Russians vacationing there, according to the Russian federal
agency for tourism. A basic package tour including a flight, hotel and
meals can be had for as little as $500 or $600 a week.
Apart
from coastal resorts in the south, much of the Sinai Peninsula is a
closed military zone, with a long-running insurgency by jihadist groups
against the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
In
the claim of responsibility, which the SITE Intelligence Group said was
issued by the Sinai Province of the Islamic State, the terrorists
indicated that they had shot the plane down in retaliation for Russia’s
military actions in Syria.
Generally,
analysts have noted that the Islamic State does not issue official
statements for attacks it has not carried out. That is less true for its
followers, however. “Soldiers of the Caliphate were able to down a
Russian airplane over Sinai province,” the statement said. “It was
carrying on board more than 220 Russian crusaders. O Russians and
whoever is allied with you, know that you neither have safety in the
lands of Muslims nor in the air, and that killing dozens every day” in
Syria “by the bombardment of your aircraft will bring calamity on you.”
It is unclear what weapon systems the Sinai branch of the Islamic State has. French officials and weapons manuals recovered in Mali confirmed
in 2013 that Al Qaeda’s branch in North Africa possessed SA-7a and
SA-7b surface-to-air missiles, which are capable of shooting down a
commercial plane during takeoff and landing but do not have the range to
hit an aircraft at high altitude.
Members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Africa have defected to the Islamic State, but it is unclear if they brought weapons with them.
The
Sinai branch of the Islamic State has displayed the capability to shoot
down an aircraft on at least one occasion. In January 2014, when the
group was known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis and had not yet linked itself to
the Islamic State, the militants used a Manpad portable missile
launcher to take down an Egyptian military helicopter. This summer, the
group also hit an Egyptian naval vessel in the Mediterranean with a
guided missile.
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