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Wednesday, 25 May 2016

Unnamed official says remains retrieved from flight MS804 indicate an explosion, head of forensics department denies

Human remains retrieved from the crash site of EgyptAir flight MS804 “suggest there was an explosion on board that may have brought down the aircraft in the east Mediterranean,” an Egyptian forensics official said. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the remains were all small and carried burn marks, suggesting a blast, but he could not say what caused it, he told the AP. There was no official comment from France’s aviation accident investigation agency. State news agency MENA reported that head of forensics Hesham Abdel Hamid denied the statement, saying investigators have so far discovered no traces of explosives. "Everything published about this matter is completely false, and mere assumptions that did not come from the Forensics Authority,” Abdel Hamid said.

Greece will begin sending Egyptian authorities key data of the crash on Wednesday, including data on the airliner as it flew through Greek airspace moments before disappearing, an unnamed source close to the probe told Reuters on Tuesday. Two sources told the news service that Greece is sticking by its claims that the plane lurched violently in mid-air before disappearing off radar screens. National Air Navigation Services Company Chairman Mohy El Din Azmi denied the accounts on Monday, as we noted in yesterday morning’s edition.

Competing theories on causation still battling it out: In other news on the crash this morning, Egyptian investigators speaking with Reuters said the airliner’s systems reported no problems before takeoff from Paris, while the Financial Times (paywall) notes that speculation about terrorism continues despite no claim of responsibility for the disaster. The salmon-colored paper writes: “The sequence of events suggested the crew had fought a losing battle against an onboard fire for several minutes rather than succumbing to a catastrophic break-up caused by a bomb. But French air crash investigators, who are involved in the inquiry, said the smoke alarms did not prove there was a fire onboard. They said that monitors can be triggered by air condensing rapidly inside the aircraft following a sudden depressurisation of the aircraft, caused by a catastrophic structural failure.”

Whatever the cause, the air disaster will prompt the U.S. to close ranks with Egypt despite Washington’s displeasure with Cairo’s human rights record, the Wall Street Journal suggests, quoting a “Western diplomat” as noting that “An incident like this on the heels of another airline disaster is always going to speed up any cooperation on security even if the cause is not yet clear.” Meanwhile, Amnesty International “is calling on European Union member states to halt arms sales to Egypt over human rights abuses it characterizes as ‘fueling killings and torture,’” the Associated Press reported last night.

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