On early Saturday, October 31, a Russian passenger plane crashed, in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula official said, killing all 224 people on board.
According to the Russian state media, most of the 217 passengers on Kogalymavia Flight 9268 were Russians returning from vacation.
Those who perished included the seven crew members, the 17 children included in the passenger manifest although Russian officials claim there were 25 on board. There were also four Ukrainian nationals in the flight as tweeted by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin.
A distressed Egyptian security officer at the crash site said, “A lot of the dead are on the ground, and many died whilst strapped to their seats. I now see a tragic scene. The plane split into two, a small part on the tail end that burned and a larger part that crashed into a rock. We have extracted at least 100 bodies and the rest are still inside.”
The Australian embassy in Cairo and Moscow had contacted local authorities and confirmed that no Australians were listed onboard the flight as stated by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
As shown in a profile of the flight released by flight tracking site flightradar24.com, the plane was climbing to 33,000 feet, when it suddenly descended to 5,000 feet before losing contact.
The Egyptian Prime Minister met with ministers and security officials to discuss the crash and the possibility of ISIS involvement, since an ISIS-aligned insurgency is active in parts of Sinai. However, there was no initial indication that they played any role in the crash.
Although there has been no official collaboration to support claims, Russian media are reporting that the pilot radioed to request landing at the nearest airport before contact with the plane was lost.
The wreckage of the passenger jet were found in the Hassana area some 70 kilometres (44 miles) south of the city of el-Arish by Egyptian military search and rescue teams, according to the civil aviation ministry statement. This is an area in northern Sinai where Egyptian security forces have for years battled a flourishing Islamic militant insurgency which is now led by a local affiliate of the extremist Islamic State group.
Hassana or Hasna, the area where the plane crashed was the scene of a World War I battle in 1917 between Britain's Imperial Camel Corps and the Turkish army.
