{"id":17419,"date":"2015-11-05T09:02:14","date_gmt":"2015-11-05T17:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/bomb-may-have-downed-russian-jet\/"},"modified":"2015-11-05T09:02:14","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T17:02:14","slug":"bomb-may-have-downed-russian-jet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/bomb-may-have-downed-russian-jet\/","title":{"rendered":"Bomb may have downed Russian jet"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONDON \u2014<\/strong> British and U.S. officials said Wednesday they have information suggesting the Russian jetliner that crashed in the Egyptian desert may have been brought down by a bomb, and Britain said it was suspending flights to and from the Sinai Peninsula indefinitely.<\/p>\n

Intercepted communications played a role in the tentative conclusion that the Islamic State group\u2019s Sinai affiliate planted an explosive device on the plane, said a U.S. official briefed on the matter. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn\u2019t authorized to discuss intelligence matters publicly.<\/p>\n

The official and others said there had been no formal judgment rendered by the CIA or other intelligence agencies, and that forensic evidence from the blast site, including the airplane\u2019s black box, was still being analyzed.<\/p>\n

The official added that intelligence analysts don\u2019t believe the operation was ordered by Islamic State leaders in Raqqa, Syria. Rather, they believe that if it was a bomb, it was planned and executed by the Islamic State\u2019s affiliate in the Sinai, which operates autonomously.<\/p>\n

Other officials cautioned that intercepted communications can sometimes be misleading and that it\u2019s possible the evidence will add up to a conclusion that there was no bomb.<\/p>\n

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said there was a \u201csignificant possibility\u201d the crash was caused by a bomb, and Britain was suspending flights to and from the Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh indefinitely.<\/p>\n

After a meeting of the British government\u2019s crisis committee, COBRA, Hammond said Britain was advising its citizens not to go on vacation to Sharm el-Sheikh, which is visited by hundreds of thousands of Britons a year.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Russian and Egyptian investigators said Wednesday that the cockpit voice recorder of the Metrojet Airbus 321-200 had suffered substantial damage in the weekend crash that killed 224 people. Information from the flight data recorder has been successfully copied and handed over to investigators, the Russians added.<\/p>\n

Several British flights due to leave Sharm el-Sheikh for the U.K. Wednesday were grounded, leaving tourists stranded.<\/p>\n

Cameron\u2019s 10 Downing St. office said late Wednesday that it could not say \u201ccategorically\u201d why the Russian jet had crashed.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut as more information has come to light, we have become concerned that the plane may well have been brought down by an explosive device,\u201d it said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Cameron had discussed the issue of security at the Sharm el-Sheikh airport with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who flew to Britain on Wednesday for an official visit, Downing Street said.<\/p>\n

The British disclosures were an embarrassment to el-Sissi, who had insisted in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday that the security situation in the Sinai Peninsula is under \u201cfull control.\u201d He has staked his legitimacy on restoring stability and reviving Egypt\u2019s economy.<\/p>\n

The suspension of flights is a further blow to Egypt\u2019s troubled tourism industry, which has suffered in the unrest that followed the 2011 Arab Spring. The one bright spot for Egypt has been tourism at the Red Sea resorts.<\/p>\n

The Irish Aviation Authority followed the British lead and directed Irish airlines to suspend flights to Sharm el-Sheikh Airport and into the airspace of the Sinai Peninsula \u201cuntil further notice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The British acted \u201ctoo soon,\u201d said Hany Ramsay, deputy head of Sharm el-Sheikh\u2019s airport.<\/p>\n

\u201cOther countries might soon follow them, Ramsay told The Associated Press, suggesting there may be political and commercial motives behind the British statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey want to hurt tourism and cause confusion,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Several airlines, including Lufthansa and Air France, stopped flying over Sinai after the crash, but British carriers had kept to their schedules. Almost 1 million Britons visit Egypt each year, many to Sharm el-Sheikh, which is also popular with Russians.<\/p>\n

The Metrojet flight carrying mostly Russian vacationers from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg broke up in the air at an altitude of 31,000 feet 23 minutes after takeoff and came down in the Sinai desert, Russian officials said.<\/p>\n

The plane crash site, 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of the city of el-Arish, lies in the northern Sinai, where Egyptian security forces have for years battled local Islamic militants.<\/p>\n

Two U.S. officials told the AP on Tuesday that U.S. satellite imagery detected heat around the jet just before it went down.<\/p>\n

The infrared activity could mean many things, including a bomb blast or an engine on the plane exploding due to a malfunction. One of the officials who spoke condition of anonymity because they weren\u2019t authorized to discuss the information publicly said a missile striking the jetliner was ruled out, because neither a missile launch nor an engine burn had been detected.<\/p>\n

The Islamic State group claimed it had downed the plane because of Moscow\u2019s recent military intervention in Syria against the extremist group, but el-Sissi dismissed that as \u201cpropaganda\u201d aimed at damaging Egypt\u2019s image.<\/p>\n

Douglas Barrie, military aerospace expert with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said it was too soon to say for sure the cause of the crash but the \u201cgeneral suspicion\u201d that an explosive device was involved has been mounting. He said the British government\u2019s decision made sense.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a political decision to err on the side of caution if it has been deemed possible that an explosive device was involved and there are concerns about the levels of security at the airport involved,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Moscow-based Interstate Aviation Commission, which oversees civil aviation in much of the former Soviet Union, said in a statement that information from the Metrojet flight\u2019s data recorder had been successfully copied and given to investigators. But the cockpit voice recorder \u201creceived serious mechanical damage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Egypt\u2019s Aviation Ministry also said the voice recorder is \u201cpartially damaged\u201d and that as a result \u201ca lot of work is required in order to extract data from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Metrojet, the plane\u2019s owner, and Russian authorities offered conflicting theories of what happened. Metrojet officials have insisted the crash was due to an \u201cexternal impact,\u201d not a technical malfunction or pilot error.<\/p>\n

Russian officials have said it\u2019s too early to jump to that conclusion. El-Sissi told the BBC that the cause of the crash may not be known for months and that there should be no speculation until then.<\/p>\n

Rescue teams in Egypt combed the Sinai desert for more remains and parts of the plane\u2019s fuselage as grief-stricken Russian families in St. Petersburg faced an agonizing wait to bury their loved ones.<\/p>\n

Russian and Egyptian rescue workers expanded their search area in the Sinai to 40 square kilometers (15 square miles). The Russian state television channel Rossiya-24 reported the plane\u2019s tail was found 5 kilometers (3 miles) away from the rest of the wreckage.<\/p>\n

Only one body has been released to a Russian family for burial so far. Relatives have identified 33 bodies and the paperwork is nearly finished on 22 of those, meaning the families should get the bodies shortly, said Igor Albin, deputy governor of St. Petersburg, in a televised conference call.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Dilanian reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Dmitry Lovetsky in St. Petersburg, Russia; Gregory Katz in London; Jim Heintz in Moscow and Nour Youssef in Cairo contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LONDON \u2014 British and U.S. officials said Wednesday they have information suggesting the Russian jetliner that crashed in the Egyptian desert may have been brought down by a bomb, and Britain said it was suspending flights to and from the Sinai Peninsula indefinitely. Intercepted communications played a role in the tentative conclusion that the Islamic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-17419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17419"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=17419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}