EGYPTIAN officials have asked reporters not to speculate about the cause. But when an aeroplane drops out of the sky, as EgyptAir flight 804 did on the morning of May 19th, many will naturally assume foul play. Even Egypt’s civil-aviation minister, Sherif Fathy, said that “the possibility of a terror attack is higher than the possibility of a technical failure.”
The plane, which was carrying 66 people from Paris to Cairo, crashed into the Mediterranean shortly before it was to land. The authorities received no distress call from the pilots, who had brought the aircraft to a normal cruising altitude of 37,000 feet (11,300 metres). Panos Kammenos, Greece’s defence minister, says it turned “90 degrees left and 360 degrees to the right” before crashing. Searchers have found debris floating some 230 miles (370km) south of Crete.
The flight left for Cairo from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, which has been struck twice by terrorism in the past 18 months. François Hollande, the French president, also refused to speculate on the cause of the crash, saying only that “no hypothesis is ruled out”. But the possibility that this...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2531OIY
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