17 children among 224 killed in Russian plane crash in Egypt

CAIRO: A Russian passenger plane with 224 people on board crashed in a mountainous part of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, leaving “many” dead including 17 children, officials said.
The chartered plane had taken off from the south Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh bound for Saint Petersburg and lost contact with air traffic control 23 minutes later before crashing in the restive peninsula.
The head of the Egyptian civil aviation authority Mahmud al-Zinati said that there were “many dead”, including 17 children.
The government said in a statement that there were 214 Russian and three Ukrainian passengers on board, and that 15 bodies had been recovered and transferred to a morgue so far. The wreckage was found roughly 100 kilometres south of the North Sinai town of El-Arish, Egyptian officials said.
The Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Moscow’s emergency ministry to dispatch rescue teams to Egypt. There was no official word on the cause of the crash.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his French counterpart Francois Hollande said they had sent their condolences to Moscow.
The Russian emergency ministry published a list of names of the passengers, ranging in age from a 10-month-old girl to a 77-year-old woman.
A senior Egyptian aviation official said the plane was a charter flight operated by a Russian firm carrying 217 passengers and seven crew members, which was flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet when communication was lost.
At Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport, anxious family members awaited news of their loved ones.
“I am meeting my parents,” said 25-year-old Ella Smirnova, a tall woman seemingly in shock.
“I spoke to them last on the phone when they were already on the plane, and then I heard the news.”
“I will keep hoping until the end that they are alive, but perhaps I will never see them again.”
A senior official in Egypt air traffic control said that the pilot told him in their last communication that he was having trouble with the plane’s radio system.
Russian aviation official Sergei Izvolsky told Interfax news agency that the plane operated by Russian carrier Kogalymavia had departed Sharm el-Sheikh at 5:51 am local time. He said the Airbus 321 did not make contact as expected with air traffic controllers in Cyprus.
“Communication was lost today with the Airbus 321 of Kogalymavia which was carrying out flight 9268 from Sharm el-Sheikh to Saint Petersburg,” Izvolsky later told Russian television networks. “The plane departed Sharm el-Sheikh with 217 passengers and seven crew members. At 7:14 Moscow time the crew was scheduled to make contact with Larnaca, however this did not happen and the plane disappeared from the radar screens.”
The flight was scheduled to land at Saint Petersburg at 0912 GMT, he said.
Kogalymavia, which now operates under the name Metrojet, says on its website it has two A320 planes and seven A321s, and that it transported 779,626 passengers in the first nine months of 2015, according to the Russian aviation agency Rosaviatsia.
Egyptian state television reported that Prime Minister Ismail Sharif was headed to the site of the accident.
The last major commercial airliner crash in Egypt happened in 2004, when a Flash Airlines Boeing 737 plunged into the Red Sea after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh. – AFP
Reuters add: Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said on Saturday it was impossible to determine the cause of the Russian plane crash until the black box was examined but that no “irregular” activities were believed to be behind it.
Ismail said in a news conference that the chances of finding survivors were now near impossible and that a Russian team would arrive in Egypt on Saturday evening. Egypt was also preparing to receive the families of the victims and 129 bodies had been recovered so far.