CAIRO — All 224 people aboard a Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt early Saturday have been confirmed dead, officials say.
An Egyptian cabinet statement on Saturday morning said that military aircraft had spotted the wreckage of the Airbus plane in a mountainous area in Sinai. The Russian Embassy in Cairo said that all on board the plane had been killed.
The Egyptian statement said that the plane had been carrying 217 passengers and seven crew members. It left the airport in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh shortly before 6 a.m. and disappeared from radar screens at 6:20 a.m. The Egyptian civil aviation ministry said the plane was at an altitude of 31,000 feet when it disappeared. It also said that search and rescue teams had reached the wreckage, in the Hasna district, south of the city of Arish in the northern Sinai Peninsula.
Speaking on a nationally broadcast news conference, Maxim Sokolov, Russia’s minister of transportation, said the cause had yet to be confirmed. Russian news reports said that preliminary details gave no indication that the plane was shot down.Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia, ordered the establishment of a state commission to investigate the crash. The Russian government also announced it was dispatching a special plane from its emergency services to take a team of investigators and rescuers to the scene. Mr. Putin also declared Sunday a day of mourning for the victims.
The plane was operated by Kogalymavia, which is privately owned, and officially changed its name to MetroJet several years ago. It operates five Airbus A-321s. The flight, Kogalymavia 9268, had been scheduled to land at Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg. Airbus said in a statement that the plane was an A321-200 that had been manufactured in 1997 and had been operated by Metrojet since 2012.
The plane requested an emergency landing before disappearing, the Interfax report said. Aircraft crew members had previously complained about the state of one engine, the RIA Novosti agency reported.
Russian news reports quoted a website called FlightRadar 24, which tracks air traffic around the globe, as saying the plane was descending at a rate of 6,000 feet per minute just before it disappeared from radar.
Those on board the flight were Russian tourists, including 17 children, according to Russian officials.
Asked about a possible link to terrorism and warnings not to fly over that region due to the violent insurgency there, Mr. Sokolov said that the Egyptian government had not closed the airspace over the Sinai Peninsula.
Apart from coastal resorts in the south, much of the Sinai Peninsula is a closed military zone and the location of a long-running insurgency by jihadist groups against the government of Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Possible threats to civil aviation from conflict on the ground is of particular interest in Russia because rebels it backs in eastern Ukraine have been accused of using a surface-to-air missile last year to bring down a Malaysia Airlines flight, killing all aboard.
Russia denies any link to the catastrophe and blames the Ukrainian government for the downing. A recent report by the Dutch government said the plane was destroyed by a missile apparently fired from territory controlled by the rebels, but it also faulted Kiev for not closing its airspace.
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.
Yet Egypt remained the No. 1 tourist destination for Russians leaving the country in first six months of 2015, with more than one 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 for a week.
The New York Times
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