No survivors in Russian plane crash: Egyptian officials

CAIRO: Several Egyptian military and security officials say there are no survivors from the Russian passenger plane carrying 224 people that crashed into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Mahmud Al-Zinati, the head of Egypt’s civil aviation authority, earlier said there were “many dead” including 17 children.

But officials who all spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media said none of the passengers and crew have survived.

On board the plane were 217 passengers, including 17 children, and 7 crew members.

Ambulances have reached the site where the Kogalymavia’s Flight 9268 had crashed and have began evacuating “casualties.” 
The wreckage was found in a mountainous area roughly 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of the North Sinai town of El-Arish, Egyptian officials said.
 State television reported that Prime Minister Ismail Sharif was headed to the site of the accident.

“Military planes have discovered the wreckage of the plane... in a mountainous area, and 45 ambulances have been directed to the site to evacuate dead and wounded,” a cabinet statement said. 
MENA news agency said the “casualties” were being transferred to nearby hospitals, without elaborating on their condition.

Egyptian and Russian officials have said the plane took off at 5:51 a.m. Egyptian time (0351 GMT) from the southern Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh bound for Saint Petersburg in Russia but communication was lost 23 minutes after departure, officials said.

An Egyptian aviation official says the pilot of the Russian airliner that crashed in the Sinai Peninsula had reported technical difficulties before losing contact with air traffic controllers.

At Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport, anxious family members awaited news of their loved ones. 
“I am meeting my parents,” said 25-year-old Ella Smirnova, a tall young woman seemingly in shock.

“I spoke to them last on the phone when they were already on the plane, and then I heard the news.”
“I will keep hoping until the end that they are alive, but perhaps I will never see them again.”

A senior Egyptian aviation official said the plane was flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet when communication was lost.
 The official said the pilot had reported technical difficulties before losing contact with air traffic controllers.

“Communication was lost today with the Airbus 321 of Kogalymavia which was carrying out flight 9268 from Sharm el-Sheikh to Saint Petersburg,” Sergei Lzvolsky, an official with the Russian aviation agency Rosaviatsia told Russian television networks.

The last major commercial airliner crash in Egypt happened in 2004, when a Flash Airlines Boeing 737 plunged into the Red Sea after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh.
The 148 people aboard that flight, most of whom were French, were killed.

Millions of tourists, many of them Russian, visit the resort town, one of Egypt’s major draws for tourists looking for pristine beaches and scuba diving.
 The resort, and others dotting the southern Sinai Red Sea coast, are heavily secured by the military and police as an Islamist militant insurgency rages in the north of the restive peninsula, which borders Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Militants in the north who pledged allegiance to the Daesh group have killed hundreds of soldiers and policemen since the army ousted Islamist president Mohammed Mursi in 2013.

-arabnews