EgyptAir wreckage found near Greek island, focus on possible terrorism being sharpened

CAIRO (Diya TV) — An EgyptAir flight en route from Paris to Cairo made abrupt turns and plunged steeply Thursday shortly before falling from radar screens over the Mediterranean Sea, a Greek official said, as investigators are placing terrorism high on the list of possible reasons the plane went down.

EgyptAir Flight MS804 had 66 souls on board.

A nightfall arrived, EgyptAir confirmed that bits of wreckage found near the Greek island of Karpathos belonged to the Airbus A320. A brief statement from the airliner gave no further details, however, investigators said they were leaving open all possibilities. A top Egyptian aviation official said the crash will likely be chalked up to technical failure.

“The possibility of a terror attack is higher than a malfunction, but again, I don’t want to hypothesize,” Egypt’s civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathy, told reporters without giving further details.

State television in Greece has reported that “objects” were spotted about 50 miles south of the plane’s last known location, but it was not immediately clear whether the debris was linked to the aircraft.

Back in Paris, where the flight originated, officials have opened their own investigations into why the A320, a French plane, vanished from radar just 45 minutes prior to its scheduled landing. French President François Hollande said the plane had “crashed,” but he gave no more details on what could have brought it down.

“No hypothesis is favored or ruled out at this stage,” a statement from the French prosecutor’s office said about its investigation.

Given the plane was at cruising altitude, the scenario of bombs or pilot intervention are inevitably much more considerable than technical malfunction.

Egypt houses a range of militant threats in the country, including a group affiliated with the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula. In October, the same group claimed responsibility for bringing down a Russian charter flight with a possible bomb smuggled onboard, killing all 224 people on the flight.

The plane made “sudden swerves” and dropped from 37,000 feet to 15,000 feet just after exiting the Greek flight-control area and entering Egyptian airspace, said Greece’s defense minister, Panos Kammenos. The first turn was a rather sharp, 90-degree veer to the east passing over the Greek island of Karpathos, Kammenos told reporters in Athens. The plane then made a 360 degree turn.

The pilot of the craft had more than 6,000 hours of flight experience, including more than 2,000 hours behind the controls of an A320. His co-pilot had nearly 3,000 flying hours. The plane itself had been in service for 17 of the past 24 hours before it vanished, traveling from Asmara, Eritrea, to Cairo, then a round-trip to Tunis, before heading to Paris. Manufactured in 2003, the A320 was powered by two International Aero Engines and had about 48,000 flight hours, Airbus said.