Terrorists are likely responsible for knocking out of the sky an Egyptian passenger plane carrying 66 people from Paris to Cairo, officials in Egypt and the U.S. said Thursday.
EgyptAir Flight 804 vanished over the Mediterranean Sea after swerving sharply and dropping off radar south of Greece, authorities said.
U.S. officials told CNN they suspect that a bomb took down the plane. But Egyptian authorities wouldn’t go that far.
“If you thoroughly analyze the situation, the possibility of having a different action or a terror attack is higher than the possibility of having a technical failure,” said Egypt’s Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy.
Hillary Clinton, speaking later in the day, arrived at the same conclusion.
“It does appear that it was an act of terrorism,” the former secretary of state said in an interview with CNN.
“Exactly how, of course, the investigation will have to determine.”
The airline, along with authorities from Egypt and Greece, announced that wreckage from the missing flight was located in the Mediterranean about 50 miles from where it disappeared.
However, officials later backed away from that assertion later Thursday — with one Greek official insisting that the items found near the island of Karpathos were not linked to the missing airliner and the search is ongoing.
Search crews were still scouring the Mediterranean late Thursday.
Several relatives of the passengers and crews gathered at Cairo International Airport hoping for a miracle.
“My daughter was a flight attendant. I don’t know anything,” an anguished woman told reporters before conflicting reports broke over the wreckage.
The Airbus A320 took off from Paris at 11:09 p.m. Wednesday after completing trips to Eritrea and Tunisia earlier in the day, officials said.
Nothing seemed amiss when the pilot spoke to Greek air traffic controllers at 2:26 a.m.
But at 2:37 a.m., the plane began behaving erratically just after it entered Egyptian airspace.
The jet made a 90-degree turn to the left followed by a wide arc to the right. Then it plunged rapidly — descending from 37,000 feet to 15,000 feet to 9,000 feet, officials said.
The plane disappeared from radar at 2:45 a.m.
Adding to the mystery, the plane emitted a signal nearly two hours after the last radio contact. Officials told the New York Times it wasn’t clear whether the signal was an emergency call sent by a crew member or an automated signal from the plane’s onboard computers.
“We don’t know if the pilot had something to do with this or if it is just the plane sending it,” said Egyptian Civil Aviation Ministry spokesman Ihab Raslan.
Of the 56 passengers on board, three were children — a boy and two babies. The plane was also carrying seven crew members and three airline security personnel.
The airline said that the flight was carrying 30 passengers from Egypt, 15 from France, two from Iraq and one each from Algeria, Belgium, Canada, Chad, Great Britain, Kuwait, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.
Hours after the plane disappeared, the airline fired off several tweets emphasizing the experience of its crew. The EgyptAir pilot had more than 6,000 flying hours, and the co-pilot had 2,700 hours, the airline said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the downing of the jet.
French President Francois Hollande said all theories are being considered.
“No hypothesis was being ruled out,” Hollande told reporters.
“When we have the truth, we must draw all the conclusions, whether it is an accident or another hypothesis, which everybody has in mind: the terrorist hypothesis.”
President Obama was receiving frequent updates about the incident. “It’s too early to definitively say what caused this disaster,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
Secretary of State Kerry offered his condolences to the victims and their loved ones. “Our thoughts are with them and all the passengers,” Kerry said.
Terrorists have seen success in taking down passenger planes over the last seven months.
Last October, Islamic State extremists took down a Russian passenger jet over Egypt — killing all 224 people on board.
The terrorists said they used a bomb hidden inside a soda can to destroy the jet flying from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula to St. Petersburg.
Earlier this year, the Al-Shabab terror group claimed responsibility after a suicide bomber punched a hole in a Somalian Daallo Airlines flight that killed one person.
With News Wire Services