Bomb may have brought down Metrojet flight 9268 over Egypt

A terrorist attack may have caused the crash of Russian airline Metrojet´s flight 9268 last weekend over the Sinai peninsula, Downing Street said.

The statement from Prime Minister David Cameron´s office appeared to contradict Egyptian and Russian air-crash investigators who, at least initially, had reportedly dismissed claims from a terrorist group that it was responsible for the tragedy.

The airliner, which had just taken off from an airport in Egypt´s Sinai peninsula, had been carrying 224 people onboard when radio communications were lost, possibly exploding afterwards in mid-air.

Downing Street said flights from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to the UK will be delayed so that British aviation security experts can assess the arrangements at the airport.

Earlier on Wednesday, officials in Cairo said the Airbus A321´s cockpit-voice recorder had been damaged in the crash, although work to retrieve the records of the final minutes of the flight would begin shortly.

Also on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg the chairman of the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, Michael McCaul, had said he wouldn’t rule out terrorism.

McCaul singled out the Al-Qaeda affiliated Khorasan terrorist grouo which, he said, has been workking to develop explosive non-metallic devices capable of evading existing screening technology.