The Russian plane that crashed in Egypt earlier last month was “highly likely” downed by a bomb planted by an Islamic State group affiliate in Egypt, British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond said during an interview with CNN Monday night. Unidentified investigators into the accident have said it is 90 percent certain the Metrojet flight was brought down by a bomb explosion.
“We think it was more likely than not an explosive device on the aircraft,” Hammond said of the cause of the plane crash that killed all 224 people on board the Russia-bound flight. “There’s got to be a high probability that ISIS was involved,” he added, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.
A military investigator from Russia stands near the debris of a Russian airliner at its crash site at the Hassana area in Arish city, north Egypt, Nov. 1, 2015. | Photo: Reuters.
The foreign minister did not believe the attack was orchestrated by the headquarters of the Islamic State group in Syria but instead was executed and planned by a group or individual inspired by the extremists' propaganda.
“It may have been an individual who was inspired by ISIS who was self-radicalized by looking at ISIS propaganda and was acting in the name of ISIS without necessarily being directed,” he said.
According to CNN, various senior U.S. intelligence, military and national security officials are certain that “terrorists” bombed the plane. One official told CNN it was "99.9 percent certain."
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The plane was headed from the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg, Russia, on Oct. 31. But not long after takeoff, it disintegrated mid-air and crashed in the Sinai Peninsula. The Islamic State group affiliate in Egypt claimed responsibility for the crash saying plane was downed by a missile.
These new comments echo those of the Russian government, which said for the first time Monday that a bomb could have been behind the downing of the plane.
"The possibility of an act of terror is of course there as the reason for what happened," Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta state newspaper.
Meanwhile, investigators told Reuters Monday that they believed that the plane was brought down by a bomb. "The indications and analysis so far of the sound on the black box indicate it was a bomb," an unnamed Egyptian investigation team member told Reuters "We are 90 percent sure it was a bomb."
People attend a religious service commemorating victims of a Russian airliner which crashed in Egypt, at St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russia November 8, 2015. | Photo: Reuters
European investigators analyzing the plane's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder say the crash was not an accident, according to France 2 channel. The investigators said the cockpit voice recorder indicates an explosion, and the flight data recorder shows the blast was not accidental.
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Last week, the first extracted data from the Russian airplane's “black box” showed sounds in the cockpit “uncharacteristic of a standard flight preceding the moment of the airliner’s disappearance.”
If the crash is proven to have been caused by a bomb, it would be the first time a civilian airplane was targeted by a terror group in more than a decade. Analysts say it would also mean that the Islamic State group and other groups in the region have developed new techniques for conducting such attacks.
Since the crash, the Egyptian government has been playing down the bomb theory, saying it was too early for “hypothesis”. Egypt has been rocked with instability since the ousting of the first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, which kicked off an insurgency against the military-backed regime there affecting the economy and turning tourists away.
So far, several countries have suspended flights to Egypt, including the United Kingdom, Turkey and several European countries. Restrictions on flights and the possibility of a terror attack threaten the Egyptian tourism sector, which is already struggling to recover from years of instability.