EgyptAir Crash: Can't Rule Out Terror Attack, Says Intelligence Firm
Even as investigators said Saturday that smoke was detected in multiple places inside the EgyptAir flight minutes before it crashed into the Mediterranean Sea with 66 people on board last week, an intelligence firm said an act of terror cannot be ruled out just because no jihadist group has claimed responsibility thus far.
The French air accident investigation agency said smoke was detected in multiple places in the EgyptAir Flight 804 before Thursday, but the cause remains unclear, according to The Associated Press, which quoted spokesman Sebastien Barthe as saying that the plane's automatic detection system sent messages indicating smoke a few minutes before it disappeared from radar while flying over the eastern Mediterranean from Paris to Cairo.
The messages "generally mean the start of a fire," he explained.
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Egypt's military on Saturday displayed wreckage and personal belongings, including an uninflated life vest, a seat, a purse, shoes, carpet, a scarf, parts of chairs and cushions and a sling bag, according to CNN.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry was quoted as saying that searchers are trying their best to recover the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, also called black boxes, which can help to learn with clarity what really happened.
After the crash, Egyptian officials said they suspect it was caused by an act of terror, but no terror group has claimed responsibility.
Some suspect that a bomb could have been placed in the plane while it was on the tarmac in Paris, or at its previous stops in Cairo or Tunis. AP quoted Sylvain Prevost, who trains Paris airport personnel, as saying that cleaning staff are trained to alert authorities to suspicious items but specialized security personnel are not routinely required to sweep a plane after the cleaning crew leaves.
Prevost said despite extensive efforts to ensure security, workers can sometimes be threatened into cooperating with criminals.
"Judging by the pattern of previous claims, if the Islamic State, al Qaeda or a regional affiliate were behind this attack, we would have expected to see a claim of responsibility by now," intelligence advisory company Strategic Forecasting said in a report Saturday. "The lack of a claim, however, does not rule out terrorism in the EgyptAir incident."
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL or Daesh, and al Qaeda "are most powerful when it comes to their ideology and their propaganda is more useful at inspiring grassroots jihadists to conduct their own attacks than in providing quality instruction on how to carry out an attack," it explained.
"If this were a grassroots attack, carried out independently by a cell in France, Tunisia or Eritrea (all locations where the aircraft had been over the 24-hour period before it crashed), then jihadist leaders and their media wings would be scrambling along with the rest of us to figure out what happened. As in the San Bernardino attack, it might take a few days for the jihadist propaganda arms to formulate a response."
It added, "The more sinister but less likely explanation is that a terrorist group has figured out a novel way to attack aircraft and is concealing its involvement in order to replicate the attack elsewhere."
The Airbus A320 had 56 passengers and 10 crew members and security onboard when it left Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris late Wednesday for Cairo. Thirty of the passengers were Egyptians, 15 French citizens, including an infant, and also passengers from Iraq, Britain, Belgium, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Chad, Portugal, Canada and Algeria, according Egypt's civil aviation ministry.
