Consensus grows in U.S. that bomb likely caused Russian plane to crash
WASHINGTON — Senior House members said Sunday that there was a mounting consensus among U.S. intelligence officials that a bomb brought down the Russian charter jet that crashed last month in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, killing all 224 people on board.
“I think there’s a growing body of intelligence and evidence that this was a bomb — still not conclusive — but a growing body of evidence,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on the ABC program “This Week.”
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on terrorism and intelligence, went further, saying on the same program that intelligence officials he had spoken to believed that the Islamic State or an affiliate was behind the crash.
“Right now all the evidence points in that direction,” King said.
Intelligence unclear
It is not clear how much U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have learned about the crash, which occurred Oct. 31. U.S. investigators have not been invited to visit the crash site, and while the Russian government has asked the FBI for help, it is not known how much information Moscow has shared with the bureau.
In the days before the crash, electronic communications in which militants discussed an aviation attack were intercepted, but U.S. officials said that type of “chatter” is often picked up.
Schiff, who was briefed by intelligence officials on Saturday, raised the possibility that someone working at the airport may have helped the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, place a bomb on the plane.
“ISIS may have concluded that the best way to defeat airport defenses is not to go through them but to go around them with the help of somebody on the inside,” Schiff said.
“And if that’s the case,” he added, “I think there are probably at least a dozen airports in the region and beyond that are vulnerable to the same kind of approach, which is exactly why we have to harden those defenses.”
Previous failures
If the Islamic State was behind the crash, it was able to mount the kind of attack that al-Qaida has found difficult to carry out in recent years.
At least three times since 2009, al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen has come close but failed to bring down an airliner using bombs that were designed to be undetectable.
Western intelligence officials have feared that the Islamic State has larger ambitions for attacks outside Syria and Iraq — where it seized large stretches of land in 2014 — especially after the United States and Russia began separate military operations against the group.
The Islamic State’s affiliate in Sinai, which controls a significant amount of territory, is believed to have a large measure of autonomy from the group’s leadership in Syria and Iraq.
The plane that crashed, an Airbus A321-200, took off from a regional airport that serves the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. The airport does not have to meet security requirements of the Department of Homeland Security because it has no direct flights to the U.S.
Before the crash, European officials complained that critical equipment, including explosive-detection and X-ray machines, had been badly maintained or operated by poorly trained staff members. One Egyptian official said he had seen workers unplug a luggage scanner to save power.
Since the crash, several countries have sent security teams to supervise the return of passengers and their luggage, which in some cases is being sent on separate flights.
“We request additional security screening to be provided at departure gates at a number of overseas airports, including Egypt,” said a spokesman for the Department for Transport in Britain. “The U.K. does not pay for these checks, which are separate to the additional precautions now being undertaken on hold baggage at Sharm.”