CAIRO: A Russian charter plane carrying 224 people crashed in a mountainous part of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, killing everyone on board, officials said.

The self-styled Islamic State (IS) group’s affiliate in Egypt claimed it downed the plane, without saying how, but an Egyptian security official said the plane did not crash because of an attack.

Russian Transport Minister Maksim Sokolov said the IS claim “cannot be considered accurate”, adding that authorities in Egypt “have no such information that would confirm such insinuations”, Russian news agencies reported.

The Airbus A321 with 214 Russian and three Ukrainian passengers and seven crewmembers, had taken off from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in south Sinai bound for Saint Petersburg. It lost contact with air traffic control 23 minutes later.

Egyptian security and medical officials said there were no survivors, and that bodies and debris were spread over around five square kilometres.

The Russian embassy in Cairo said: “Unfortunately, all passengers of Kogalymavia flight 9268 Sharm el-Sheikh-Saint Petersburg have died. We issue condolences to family and friends.”

The wreckage was found roughly 100 kilometres south of the North Sinai town of El-Arish, Egyptian officials said.

The IS affiliate waging an insurgency in the Sinai claimed that “the soldiers of the ‘caliphate’ succeeded in bringing down a Russian plane”.

It said this was in revenge for Russian air strikes against IS in Syria.

Three military experts said IS in Sinai does not have surface-to-air missiles capable of hitting a plane at high altitude.

But they could not exclude the possibility of a bomb on board or a surface-to-air missile strike if the aircraft had descended for an emergency landing.

Rescue teams

The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin ordered rescue teams dispatched to Egypt.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his French counterpart Francois Hollande sent Moscow their condolences.

Russia’s emergency ministry published a list of names of the passengers, ranging in age from a 10-month-old girl to a 77-year-old woman.

A senior Egyptian aviation official said the charter flight was flying at 30,000 feet when communication was lost.

At Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport, family members awaited news of their loved ones.

“I am meeting my parents,” said 25-year-old Ella Smirnova. “I spoke to them last on the phone when they were already on the plane, and then I heard the news.

“I will keep hoping until the end that they are alive, but perhaps I will never see them again,” she said.

A senior Egyptian air traffic control official said the pilot told him in their last communication that he had radio trouble.

Russian aviation official Sergei Izvolsky told Interfax news agency the aircraft took off from Sharm el-Sheikh at 5:51am.

He said it did not make contact as expected with Cyprus air traffic control.

“Communication was lost today with the Airbus 321 of Kogalymavia which was carrying out flight 9268 from Sharm el-Sheikh to Saint Petersburg,” Izvolsky told Russian television networks.

“The plane departed Sharm el-Sheikh with 217 passengers and seven crewmembers. At 7:14 Moscow time the crew was scheduled to make contact with...

Larnaca (Cyprus). However, this did not happen and the plane disappeared from the radar screens.”

Safety record

Kogalymavia, which operates under the name Metrojet, says it has two A320s and seven A321s, and that it carried 779,626 passengers in the first nine months of 2015, according to the Russian aviation agency Rosaviatsia.

Russia has a dismal air safety record, with charter operators often under pressure to book to capacity on ageing jets in an attempt to cut costs.

No representative of the airline could be found at the airport in Saint Petersburg and calls to company phones went unanswered.

Kogalymavia is a small regional carrier that flies mostly international charter services.

Russia’s regional carriers are notorious, and the crash is likely to raise renewed concerns about the safety of air travel in a country with an ageing fleet of airliners.

The last major air crash in Egypt was in 2004, when a Flash Airlines Boeing 737 plunged into the Red Sea after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh.

All 148 people on board, most of whom were French, died.

Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2015

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