Obama on Russian Plane Crash: ‘It is Certainly Possible That There Was a Bomb on Board’
(CNSNews.com) – President Obama said Thursday “it is certainly possible that there was a bomb on board” a Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula last weekend. Obama was speaking just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin chided Britain’s prime minister for similar comments.
London’s Daily Telegraph reported early Friday that a review by British and U.S. intelligence agencies, undertaken since the crash, had revealed communications “chatter” in the days before plane went down, pointing to an imminent terrorist attack.
All 224 people aboard the MetroJet Airbus A321-200 were killed when it crashed shortly after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh on a flight to St. Petersburg.
Asked during an interview with CBS affiliate KIRO Radio in Seattle whether he believed a bomb brought down the plane, Obama began, “I don’t think we know yet.”
“Whenever you’ve got a plane crash, first of all you’ve got the tragedy, you’ve got making sure there’s an investigation on site,” he continued. “I think there is a possibility that there was a bomb on board. And we are taking that very seriously.”
Obama said, without elaborating, that the procedures in place in the U.S. were different to those used in Egypt.
“And we’re going to spend a lot of time just making sure that our own investigators and our own intelligence community figures out exactly what’s going on before we make any definitive pronouncements,” he said. “But it is certainly possible that there was a bomb on board.”
Earlier Thursday, British Prime Minister David Cameron said in London that it looked “more likely than not” that the plane was brought down by a “terrorist bomb.”
“I cannot be sure, my experts cannot be sure that it was a terrorist bomb that brought down that Russian plane,” he said during a joint press conference with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
“But if the intelligence and the judgment are that that is a more likely than not outcome, then I think it’s right to act in the way that I did,” he added, in reference to Britain’s decision to suspended all flights to and Sharm el-Sheikh. .
Shortly after the crash, a Sinai-based terrorist group affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) claimed responsibility, an assertion quickly dismissed by both Russia and Egypt.
Russia, which for more than a month has been carrying out what it calls an anti-ISIS airstrike campaign in Syria – in support of its ally, President Bashar al-Assad – is not happy about what it views as speculative and premature comments.
After Putin and Cameron spoke by phone Thursday, the Kremlin said in a curt statement the Russian leader had “stressed that assessment of the causes of the crash should be based on the data that would become available in the course of the official investigation that is currently underway.”
A Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said the British government had provided Moscow with no information about the crash.
“If they do have it and don’t share it with us, this is shocking,” she said. “If some countries have information on the plane crash it should be officially submitted to investigators.”
An unnamed foreign ministry official told Itar-TASS news agency, “We are against hasty assessments that this was a terrorist attack. We have no such information.”
Egyptian authorities, too, have bristled at the suggestion that terrorists were responsible and urged Britain to reconsider its flight suspension. The Sinai’s Red Sea coast is a major tourism revenue earner, with Sharm el-Sheikh and other resorts popular with European visitors.
Cameron’s office announced late Thursday that flights to bring stranded British citizens back from Sharm el-Sheikh would resume on Friday. Passengers will only be allowed hand baggage, however; the rest of their luggage will be transported back to Britain separately, and returned to them as soon as possible, it said.
Outbound flights from Britain to the Sinai resort remain suspended.
U.S. carriers do not fly to or from Sharm el-Sheikh.
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