Obama says bomb on plane a ‘possibility’
President admits ‘I don’t think we know’ cause yet
President Barack Obama says there is “a possibility” that a terrorist bomb was responsible for the destruction of a Russian passenger plane.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Thursday evening that there was “a possibility” that a terrorist bomb was responsible for the destruction of a Russian passenger plane that broke up last Saturday over the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
Obama said in a radio interview that there may have been a bomb on the plane, but he did not go as far as his counterparts in Britain, who have suggested that the destruction of the plane, and the death of all on board, was likely the result of a terrorist explosion.
“I don’t think we know yet,” Obama told the Seattle radio station KIRO during an interview broadcast Thursday afternoon. “Whenever you’ve got a plane crash, first of all you’ve got the tragedy, you’ve got — making sure there’s an investigation on site. I think there is a possibility that there was a bomb on board. And we are taking that very seriously.”
The president added: “We are going to spend a lot of time making sure our own investigators and our own intelligence community figures out exactly what’s going on before we make any definitive pronouncements.”
At the White House earlier in the day, officials said that the United States had not yet made a determination about the cause of the accident, but said that the government had not ruled the possibility that a bomb took the plane down.
Obama’s comments were the first direct indication by the president that the downing of the Russian airliner might have been something other than a technical malfunction. U.S. officials have repeatedly cautioned that the cause of the crash was still under investigation.
Officials have noted that no U.S. airlines fly to or from the airport in Egypt where the Russian plane left from. And they said before the crash, the Federal Aviation Administration had already issued guidance to airlines to fly higher above the region.
In London on Thursday, Prime Minister David Cameron, said that “more likely than not a terrorist bomb,” had brought down the plane as he announced bring British citizens back from the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.
In a joint appearance at No. 10 Downing Street with the Egyptian president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Cameron said, “My role is to act in the right way to keep British citizens safe and secure.” He did not cite what specific intelligence he had suggesting the explosion that felled the Russian plane about a half hour after it took off from Sharm el-Sheikh was deliberate.
El-Sissi, who has counseled against jumping to premature conclusions, did not criticize Cameron’s earlier decision to temporarily suspend flights between Britain and Sharm el Sheikh, but Egyptian officials in Cairo did just that.
Hossam Kamal, the Egyptian minister of civil aviation, said that the suggestion of a bomb was not based on facts — and that there was as yet no evidence for that theory.
In a telephone conversation on Thursday with Cameron, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, also took exception to his comments, saying that any “assessment of the causes of the crash should be based on the data” from the investigation, the Kremlin said in a statement.