CAIRO — An EgyptAir passenger jet that took off from Paris with 66 people on board suddenly disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday morning, shortly before it was due to land in Cairo.
EgyptAir Flight 804 departed Paris at 11:09 p.m. on Wednesday. At 2:26 a.m., the pilot spoke to Greek air traffic controllers, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, officials said. Three or four minutes later, the plane last made radar contact.
At 2:37 a.m., shortly after entering Egyptian air space, the plane made a 90-degree turn to the left and then a full circle to the right, plunging to 9,000 feet from 37,000 feet and disappearing from radar, the Greek defense minister, Panos Kammenos, said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
As the authorities mounted an intense search-and-rescue operation focused around the Greek island of Karpathos, between Crete and Rhodes, President François Hollande of France confirmed that the plane had crashed and acknowledged that “the terrorist hypothesis” was one of several that investigators were looking into.
“The information that we have been able to gather — the prime minister, the members of the government, and, of course, the Egyptian authorities — unfortunately confirm for us that this plane crashed at sea and has been lost,” Mr. Hollande said at the Élysée Palace, after speaking by telephone with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.
Mr. Hollande said that “no hypothesis was being ruled out,” and that the three countries were hoping to recover “debris that would enable us to know the truth.”
He added, “When we have the truth, we must draw all the conclusions, whether it is an accident or another hypothesis, which everybody has in mind: the terrorist hypothesis.”
Comments
Post a Comment