© REUTERS/
CHRISTIAN HARTMANN
CAIRO
(Sputnik) – Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said he does not
rule out the possibility of a terrorist act on board the
EgyptAir passenger plane that disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea
earlier on Thursday.
“It’s still
too early to speak of the reasons for the disappearance
of the aircraft,” Ismail told journalists, adding that he does not exclude
the possibility of a terrorist act on board.
Egypt Air
Flight MS804 departed from the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris
at 23:09 GMT. The aircraft was heading for Cairo International
Airport. According to the airline, there were a total of 66 people
on board the plane, including 56 passengers.
Earlier
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that no assumption can be ruled out at
this stage on the causes of the disappearance of the Airbus A320 of the
EgyptAir airline.
"No
hypothesis can be rejected at the current stage on the causes of this [aircraft’s]
disappearance," Valls told the RTL broadcaster.
France is
ready to participate in searches for the missing plane, he stressed.
French
Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault on Thursday said French aircraft and ships
will be sent into the area of the missing EgyptAir passenger jet that
disappeared in Mediterranean Sea to help with search and rescue efforts.
Greece and
Egypt’s armed forces have both joined efforts in searching for the missing
plane.
Earlier in
the day, media reports, citing a Greek civil aviation source, suggested that
the EgyptAir plane had crashed near Karpathos. The Hellenic National Defense
General Staff denied the information.
The Hellenic National Defense General Staff told Sputnik Thursday it was
unable to confirm that EgyptAir flight MS804 crashed near the Greek island of
Karpathos, as no debris had been found.
Answering a
question whether the General Staff had any information regarding what they had
found, the press office said, "We don’t have. We are waiting from the
coast guard. Until now we did not find anything."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.