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At Press Time:

  Terrorism Suspected in Crash of EgyptAir Jetliner

MAGGIE MICHAEL                 Police officers patrol at Charles de Gaulle airport, outside of Paris, Thursday, May 19, 2016. An EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo
ELENA BECATOROS                with 66 passengers and crew on board crashed into the Mediterranean Sea off the Greek island of Crete early Thursday morning,
RAPHAEL SATTER                 Egyptian and Greek officials said.
Associated Press
CAIRO (AP) — An EgyptAir                                                                                                                                                              (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
jetliner en route from Paris
to Cairo with 66 people        searched the suspected          Fathi cautioned that the di-     they had downed the            brought down by a bomb,
aboard veered wildly in        crash area throughout the       saster was still under investi-  plane.                         and a local branch of the
flight and crashed in the      day for traces of the airliner  gation but said the possibil-    If it was terrorism, it would  Islamic State claimed re-
Mediterranean Sea early        or its victims, with more help  ity it was a terror attack “is   be the second deadly           sponsibility.
Thursday, authorities said.    on the way from the  U.S.,      higher than the possibility of   attack involving Egypt’s       Thursday’s disaster also rais-
Egyptian and Russian offi-     Britain and France.             having a technical failure.”     aviation industry in seven     es questions about security
cials said it may have been    But as night fell, they had     Alexander Bortnikov, chief       months.                        at De Gaulle Airport, at a
brought down by terrorists.    yet to find any confirmed       of Russia’s top domestic se-     Last October, a Russian        time when Western Europe
There were no signs of survi-  debris, at one point dismiss-   curity agency, went further,     passenger plane that took      has been on high alert over
vors. EgyptAir Flight 804, an  ing a reported sighting of      saying: “In all likelihood it    off from an Egyptian Red       the deadly Islamic extremist
Airbus A320 with 56 passen-    life vests and other floating   was a terror attack.”            Sea resort crashed in the      attacks in Paris and at the
gers and 10 crew members,      material.                       There was no immediate           Sinai, killing all 224 people  Brussels airport and subway
went down about halfway        Civil Aviation Minister Sherif  claim from militants that        aboard. Russia said it was     over the past six months.q
between the Greek island
of Crete and Egypt’s coast-
line, or around 175 miles
(282 kilometers) offshore,
after takeoff from Charles
de Gaulle Airport, authori-
ties said.
Greek Defense Minister
Panos Kammenos said the
plane spun all the way
around and suddenly lost
altitude just before van-
ishing from radar screens
around 2:45 a.m. Cairo
time (12:45 a.m. GMT).
He said it made a 90-de-
gree left turn, then a full
360-degree turn to the
right, plummeting from
38,000 feet (11,582 me-
ters) to 15,000 feet (4,572
meters). It disappeared at
about 10,000 feet (3,048
meters), he said. There
were no reports of stormy
weather at the time.
Egyptian and Greek au-
thorities in ships and planes