Moscow: The Russian Airbus that crashed killing all the 224 people aboard in Egypt on Saturday broke apart “in the air”, senior official with Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee said Sunday.
“The disintegration happened in the air and the fragments are strewn over a large area,” committee chief Viktor Sorochenko was quoted as saying by RIA-Novosti news agency in Cairo, where he is part of an international panel of experts from Russia, Egypt, France and Ireland.
Meanwhile, the black boxes of the ill-fated plane were recovered and sent for analysis amid claims by an IS-affiliate group that it downed the jet. The group in Egypt, which is waging a deadly insurgency in the Sinai, claimed it downed the plane in the mountainous area of the Sinai Peninsula but both Cairo and Moscow rejected the claim.
Egyptian PM Sharif Ismail said experts had confirmed that the militants could not down a plane at the 30,000 feet while Russian transport minister Maxim Sokolov said the claim “cannot be considered accurate”.
