An EgyptAir plane with 66 people aboard crashed during a flight from Paris to Cairo early Thursday — and terrorism is a stronger possibility than technical issues, officials said.
While the cause of the crash over the Mediterranean Sea has not been determined, Egypt’s Aviation Minister said a terror attack was a more likely explanation than a mechanical issue on the plane.
U.S. officials told CNN that their early belief is that a bomb took down the plane. Investigators in Egypt and Greece have not confirmed that theory.
French President Francois Hollande confirmed that the passenger plane carrying 66 people went down less than 200 miles from Egypt’s coast, but he did not comment on what caused the disaster.
No hypothesis is being ruled out, he said.
Flight MS804 — carrying mostly French and Egyptian nationals and flown by an AirEgypt captain with 6,000 flying hours — made a series of abrupt turns before it disappeared from radar, the Greek defense minister Panos Kammenos said.
It was over water, about 175 miles off the African coast, and had just entered Egyptian airspace when it made a 90-degree turn to the left, descended briefly and then went missing, he said.
Meanwhile, Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said that it was too early to speculate about mechanical problems or terrorism.
The plane — with 10 crew and 56 passengers on board, including two babies and a child — had taken off from Charles de Gaulle Airport late Wednesday and was scheduled to touch down in Cairo shortly before 3 a.m. local time.
A distress signal went off in the area where the plane vanished around 4:30 a.m. Thursday, about two hours after it went missing, AirEgypt officials said. It’s not clear where the reported signal came from — and Egyptian armed forces stressed that they did not receive any kind of distress call about it.
Officials have not declared the people on board presumed dead, and a fleet of search crews is searching the sea for possible survivors and plane wreckage.
As of 11:30 a.m. in Cairo, the Egyptian military was still searching for the 2003 model Airbus A320 with assistance from Greece and a French surveillance jet that was already in the region.
Hellenic National Defense General Staff spokesman Vasilios Beletsiotis told the Daily News that two planes, two helicopters and a frigate had been sent to an area south-southeast of the island of Karpathios.
Thirty Egyptians, 15 French and two Iraqis were on the plane, in addition to one person each from Algeria, Belgium, Canada, Chad, Great Britain, Kuwait, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.
The downed jet was an Airbus A320, generally considered one of the safest passenger planes in service. Overall, the A320 registered just 0.14 fatal accidents per million takeoffs, according to a Boeing safety analysis published last year.
The disappearance comes roughly two months after a man from the Middle Eastern country made international headlines for hijacking an EgyptAir plane by saying he was wearing a suicide vest.
Seif Eddin Mustafa, 58, said he made the vessel land in Cyprus, in an attempt to see his ex-wife on the island.
No one was injured in that incident, and Mustafa is facing extradition back to Egypt.
In late October, 224 people were killed aboard a Russian plane leaving the country’s Sinai Peninsula. Most of those who died were tourists.
Islamic State militants later claimed responsibility and said it brought the flight down with a bomb.
With News Wire Services
This is a developing story and will be updated.