LONDON: As Britain probed security at Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh airport and scrambled Thursday to repatriate thousands of its tourists, Cairo and Moscow played down the notion that a bomb downed a Russian plane.
Egypt’s civil aviation minister Hossam Kamal said investigators “have as yet no evidence or data confirming the theory” of a bomb attack.
And the Kremlin dismissed any claims over the cause as “speculation.”
“The reasons for what happened can only be put forward by the investigation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
“Any other proposed explanations seem like unverified information or some sort of speculation.”
A senior Russian lawmaker said on Thursday Britain’s decision to stop flights from Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh resort was motivated by London’s opposition to Russia’s actions in Syria, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
“There is geopolitical opposition to the actions of Russia in Syria,” said Konstantin Kosachev, a senior member of Russia’s upper house of parliament, when asked about Britain’s decision.
Several European governments said they were reviewing the situation after London suspended all flights in and out of the Red Sea resort, where most tourists are British or Russian.
Prime Minister David Cameron also called an emergency cabinet meeting on how to start repatriating holidaymakers.
The United States and Britain believe a bomb may have downed a Russian tourist plane, which crashed soon after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday bound for Saint Petersburg, killing all 224 people on board.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sissi was set to hold long-planned talks with British Prime Minister Cameron in London on Thursday, during his first visit to Britain since he led the army’s overthrow of his predecessor Muhammad Mursi.
Cameron was to chair a meeting of Britain’s emergencies committee beforehand.
Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Britain was planning emergency measures to repatriate holidaymakers from Sharm el-Sheikh, starting from Friday.
There are an estimated 20,000 Britons currently in the Sinai peninsula resort.
Hammond said the measures “will allow us to screen everything going onto those planes, double-check those planes so we can be confident that they can fly back safely to the UK.”
A small British military team has been sent to the resort as part of the review.
Premature conclusion
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told CNN television it was “somewhat premature” to reach conclusions and suspend flights.
But Hammond said Shoukry “hasn’t seen all the information that we have.”
The Daesh (Arabic acronym for Islamic State) jihadist group claims it caused the disaster and said Wednesday it would reveal how at a time of its choosing.
If confirmed, it would be the first time the militant group, which controls large areas of Syria and Iraq, has bombed a passenger plane.
The Daesh affiliate in Egypt is waging a bloody insurgency in north Sinai that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers.
Egypt is keen to preserve the country’s economically vital tourism sector on the peninsula.
Egyptian officials said Wednesday that investigators probing the Russian plane’s black boxes had extracted the data from one of them for analysis, but added the other had been damaged and required a lot of work.
Russian airline Kogalymavia, which operated the plane, has ruled out a technical fault or human error, drawing fire from the head of Russia’s aviation authority for a “premature” assessment.
The team investigating the crash of a Russian airliner in Egypt will examine whether there was any explosive material onboard the plane, Alexander Neradko, head of Russian aviation agency Rosaviatsia, told Russia 24 television on Thursday.
Neradko said the investigation team would reach its first conclusions in a few months.
Tell-tale signs of explosion
Experts say the fact that debris and bodies were strewn over a wide area points indicated the aircraft disintegrated in mid-air, meaning the crash was likely caused by either a technical fault or a bomb on board.
Flight KGL9268 was flying at altitude of 30,000 feet (9,150 meters) when it lost contact with authorities, 23 minutes after take-off.
Russia has begun burying the first victims of the country’s deadliest air disaster.
Several hundred relatives and friends gathered in the city of Veliky Novgorod, south of Saint Petersburg, to bid farewell to Nina Lushchenko, a 60-year-old school employee.
The commander of the Russian air force Viktor Bondarev said Moscow sent anti-aircraft missile systems to Syria to back up its air campaign in order to counter “every possible threat.”
“Let’s imagine a military plane is hijacked and taken to a neighboring country and air strikes are aimed at us. And we have to be ready for this,” he was quoted as saying in Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper’s Thursday edition.
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