US, UK suggest bomb brought down jet

LONDON ( AP) — British and US officials said Wednesday they have information suggesting the Russian jetliner that crashed in the Egyptian desert may have been brought down by a bomb, and Britain said it was suspending flights to and from the Sinai Peninsula indefinitely.

Intercepted communications played a role in the tentative conclusion that the Islamic State (IS) group’s Sinai affiliate planted an explosive device on the plane, said a US official briefed on the matter. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss intelligence matters publicly.

The official and others said there had been no formal judgment rendered by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other intelligence agencies, and that forensic evidence from the blast site, including the airplane’s black box, was still being analyzed.

The official added that intelligence analysts don’t believe the operation was ordered by IS leaders in Raqqa, Syria. Rather, they believe that if it was a bomb, it was planned and executed by the IS’s affiliate in the Sinai, which operates autonomously.

Other officials cautioned that intercepted communications can sometimes be misleading and that it’s possible the evidence will add up to a conclusion that there was no bomb.

After a meeting of the British government’s crisis committee, COBRA, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Britain was advising its citizens not to go on vacation to Sharm el-Sheikh, which is visited by hundreds of thousands of Britons a year.

The Irish Aviation Authority followed the British lead and directed Irish airlines to suspend flights to Sharm elSheikh Airport and into the airspace of the Sinai Peninsula “until further notice.”

Meanwhile, Russian and Egyptian investigators said Wednesday that the cockpit voice recorder of the Metrojet Airbus 321-200 had suffered substantial damage in the weekend crash that killed 224 people. Information from the flight data recorder has been successfully copied and handed over to investigators, the Russians added.

AP Russians visit a makeshift memorial for the plane crash victims in St. Petersburg Wednesday. According to a US official, they have intelligence reports that someone at the airport assisted a terrorist to plant a bomb on the Russian Metrojet plane.