FBI to assist Russia in crash probe
Rare request suggests difficulty of investigation
Washington — The FBI has agreed to help the Russian government with its investigation into the deadly crash of a Russian charter plane in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, senior U.S. officials said Saturday.
The Russians are requesting the Americans’ assistance in analyzing the forensics from the debris of the plane, an Airbus A321-200, to determine what brought it down, the officials said.
It is rare for the Russians to make such a request, first reported Friday by CBS News, and some U.S. officials interpreted it as a sign of the challenges facing investigators.
Moreover, although the FBI and its Russian counterpart, the FSB, often work together on terrorism issues when they see a common enemy — in Muslim extremist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State, for example — U.S.-Russian relations are at one of their lowest points since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In Cairo on Saturday, the head of the Egyptian-led committee investigating the crash said investigators were focusing on a sound heard in the last second of a 23-minute cockpit voice recording, but insisted that it was still premature to consider any specific explanations.
At a news conference, Ayman al-Muqaddam, head of the committee, confirmed previously reported data about the Oct. 31 crash, which killed all 224 aboard, and said 58 investigators and technical advisers from Egypt and France, Russia, Ireland and Germany were working on the inquiry.
He did not elaborate on the sound on the recording and emphasized that all possibilities were being considered. When asked specifically what was being looked at, al-Muqaddam listed as possibilities a lithium battery explosion in a passenger’s luggage, a fuel tank explosion, fuselage fatigue or “the explosion of anything.”
“We can say that an inflight breakup took place,” al-Muqaddam said. “Saying more than this would be entering the space of inference.”
He said nothing about the theory that a terrorist bomb brought down the plane, an explanation that has been endorsed by Britain and that President Barack Obama has said he is taking “very seriously.”
The plane, flown by the Russian airline Metrojet, was on its way from the Red Sea resort town Sharm el-Sheikh to Moscow when it disappeared from radar screens at about 30,000 feet. Egypt, which is highly dependent on the money tourists bring to Sharm el-Sheikh, has dismissed any suggestion that a bomb exploded on the plane.
In an apparent reference to the bomb theory, al-Muqaddam said that some media reports “claimed to be based on official intelligence that favors a certain scenario for the cause of the accident” and that Egypt had not been provided with that information. After fielding two questions, he left hurriedly, saying, “Please, people are waiting for me!”