Egypt searches for air crash answers
Human remains and wreckage found in Mediterranean but no claim by terrorists and hunt for black boxes could take years
BODY parts, suitcases and seats from the missing EgyptAir flight were found in the Mediterranean yesterday but investigators were still struggling to locate the black box recorders they hope will reveal what happened to the doomed aircraft.
Egypt’s government told the families of the 66 people aboard that there were “no survivors” but the discovery of the debris gave no answers as to whether the Airbus A320 was brought down by a terrorist’s bomb or some other cause.
No terrorist group claimed responsibility for destroying the aircraft but experts suggested Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) or another jihadist group might be trying to maintain “operational security” as it plotted other attacks.
Smoke was detected inside the aircraft cabin in the final moments before it crashed, according to the Aviation
Herald – which could indicate an explosion or a fire onboard the aircraft.
Investigators pored over CCTV footage at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, from which Flight 804 took off, and questioned ground staff with access to secure areas as heavily armed troops patrolled the terminals.
Meanwhile, on the streets of Cairo friends and family of the victims mourned openly, but with no bodies to bury they were limited to holding services of “prayers for the absent” at the city’s mosques.
Among the mourners was Pasant El-Nabrawy, an EgyptAir flight attendant who knew all seven of the dead crew members. “I have a lot of memories of my friends but I say my God will help us,” she said.
Wreckage from the aircraft was found by the Egyptian navy around 180 miles north of Alexandria, roughly the area where Flight 804 disappeared from radar on Thursday morning after a series of violent changes of direction.
Ahmed Adel, EgyptAir’s vice president, said it was “a relief ” to have discovered at least some debris but that it was too early to speculate on the cause. “In a lot of accidents it takes years to find the probable cause. Some cases are never resolved,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
Investigators are searching for the black boxes that record what was said in the cockpit in the flight’s final minutes and show its movements before the crash.
The plane is thought have gone down in an area of the Mediterranean where depths can reach 10,000ft. Black boxes from the 2009 crash of an Air France jet in the South Atlantic were recovered at 13,000ft but the search took two years and required a remotely operated submarine.
A French patrol boat with specialist sonar set sail for the site to help locate the black boxes. A European Space Agency satellite also detected what appeared to be an oil slick near the site.
The wife of the only British victim of the crash, 40-year-old Richard Osman, had warned him to be careful when travelling but he had shrugged off the fears saying: “It is never going to happen to me.”
New details emerged yesterday of some of the passengers. Pascal Hess, from Evreux in Normandy had been close to cancelling his ticket to Cairo after he had lost his passport. But a neighbour soon found it, a friend said.
Joao David e Silva was named by CNN as another victim. Mr Silva worked for Mota-Engil, a Portuguese construction company, who confirmed an em- ployee was on the plane but would not give a name to CNN.
A Portuguese government source said the married father-of-four lived in Johannesburg for work.
Seitchi Mahamat, from Chad, was a cadet at the Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan, an engineering and military academy in Paris. The Guardian reported he was going home after his mother’s death.
Max Abrahms, a terrorism theorist at Northeastern University, said the fact that no group had claimed responsibility did not mean the flight was not brought down by terrorism and that there could be a “strategic logic” for jihadists to stay silent.
“Let’s say a group had designs on attacking multiple airlines in a short span of time, it might not want to claim credit for the first attack because it could put other plots at risk,” he said.
French detectives were focusing on airport staff with red badges which give them access to restricted areas, including baggage handlers, gate agents and security guards. Last year dozens of the badges were withdrawn from staff suspected of radicalisation.
Hundreds of Egyptians gathered at Abu Bakr El Seddik mosque near EgyptAir’s Cairo headquarters to pay respects to those killed on Flight 804.
Cabin crew and fellow pilots paid tribute to Captain Mohammed Shakir, a cheerful and religious man who would pray on board and help others find the direction of Mecca using the navigation equipment.
Another pilot, Sameh Ezzat, said he did not believe a technical fault could have brought down the A320. “Even if there was a human mistake or fault this type of aircraft would automatically correct,” he said.