The British government has said up to 20,000 of its citizens will be evacuated from Sharm el-Sheikh regardless of the cost and normal flights may not resume for weeks, after UK and US intelligence sources suggested the Russian plane disaster may have been caused by a bomb.
Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, said the UK would do whatever it took to bring tourists home, despite Egypt’s claims that such measures were premature and unwarranted.
The UK acted unilaterally on Wednesday night, as David Cameron ordered the suspension of all flights to and from Sharm el-Sheikh – the airport from which the Russian Metrojet plane that crashed in Sinai on Saturday took off.
It has emerged that Cameron did not consult the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who was in the air at the time on his way to London for long-scheduled talks at Downing Street. Those talks are now likely to be marred by tensions about the UK’s assessment that Egypt does not have adequate security at the Red Sea resort’s airport.
There were unconfirmed reports on Thursday morning that the head of security at Sharm el-Sheikh airport had left his job.
Cameron will chair a meeting of the government’s emergency Cobra committee on Thursday morning, before entering discussions with the Egyptians at No 10.
Egypt’s foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, has criticised the move as unwarranted, while Konstantin Kosachyov, chair of the foreign committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, has suggested the UK’s decision was meant to put “psychological pressure” on Russia over its airstrikes against Syrian rebels.
However, within hours of the UK announcement, Ireland had also suspended flights and CNN reported an anonymous US official saying the latest intelligence suggested a bomb was planted on the plane by Isis or one of its affiliates. “A bomb is a highly possible scenario,” a US official told Agence France-Presse, four days after the Airbus crashed in Sinai, killing all 224 people on board.
Germany urged travellers to Egypt to avoid the peninsula but said the cause of the plane crash was still unclear.
Hammond defended the UK’s decision to be the first to act in a round of broadcast interviews on Thursday, saying he expected other countries to take similar precautions after they had seen the intelligence.
He said return flights were not expected to resume until Friday at the earliest, and could take longer. Asked about flights out to Sharm el-Sheikh for those who have booked holidays, he warned: “That could take days, it could take weeks ... it depends on the experts.”
Hammond said there were two stages of the operation: emergency measures to get the 20,000 British citizens home and longer-term arrangements to allow resumption of flights as normal.
“We will do whatever is necessary,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “If we have to send in additional personnel, additional equipment, if we have to have unusual handling for returning those flights, we will do so, regardless of the cost, regardless of the delay, regardless of the inconvenience.”
He told Sky News that tour operators would be sending empty planes out to Sharm el-Sheikh to fly holidaymakers back. He estimated that it will take up to 10 days starting from Friday to clear the backlog of Britons stranded in the resort.
Hammond said British military aircraft may have been used to transport aviation security experts to Sharm but there was no plan to use them to carry holidaymakers back to the UK.
He said: “As we saw in aftermath of the Sousse attacks, the tour operators are actually the ones who have the capacity to organise this. They have access to huge numbers of aircraft and seats, they are organised they are geared up to deal with this kind of issue when it arises and we would expect the tour operators to manage all the capacity that’s needed to bring people out from Sharm el-Sheikh using regular tour operator flights, it’s just in the short term they will fly out empty in order to bring people back.”
Pressed on the nature of the intelligence, Hammond said it was a signficant possibility it was caused by a bomb. An affliate of Isis claimed responsibility for a second time on Thursday.
Hammond said: “Some intelligence we can share, some we can’t. But we reached this decision on the basis of a review of all the information – intelligence is one part of it, but there’s open-source information, there’s contextual background information – and we’ve reached a conclusion.
“What we are sharing with all our partners is our conclusion. And I expect during the course of today you will see more and more of those partners looking at our conclusions and listening to our explanations and deciding that they too want to take a precautionary approach.”
Earlier on Wednesday, a White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said: “US officials have been in touch with both Egyptian and Russian officials and have offered assistance.”
But he said the US would not be following Britain’s measures because no US airlines regularly operate out of Sharm el-Sheikh. Since March, the US has advised civil aviation to avoid flying at lower altitudes – less than 26,000 feet – over Sinai because of the potential risk. Egypt and Russia have downplayed suggestions that the crash is linked to terrorism and dismissed claims of responsibility by an Islamist group in Sinai.
The UK has intervened despite playing no part in the crash’s official investigation committee, which is formed from representatives from Ireland, Russia, France and Germany.
The plane had taken off from Sharm el-Sheikh early on Saturday morning and disappeared from the radar about 25 minutes later, at around 6.20am local time.
Egypt’s civil aviation ministry announced on Wednesday evening that the plane’s black box had been retrieved, and would be subject to detailed analysis by investigators.
A senior Egyptian government official declined to comment directly on the UK’s decision to ground flights, but suggested it was premature to attribute the crash to a bomb. “We are waiting for the international investigations team to produce their latest report on the black boxes,” said the cabinet spokesman, Hossam el-Qawish.
Investigators have taken samples from the bodies of passengers killed in the crash, and they are being analysed by forensic experts for any further clues as to what might have brought down the plane, he added.
However, a Russian aviation source told Reuters that the official investigation was looking into the possibility of an object stowed on board causing the disaster. “There are two versions now under consideration: something stowed inside [the plane] and a technical fault. But the airplane could not just break apart in the air – there should be some action. A rocket is unlikely as there are no signs of that,” the source said.
A US military satellite picked up a heat flash in the final moments of the plane’s flight, the New York Times reported. That the explosion was strong enough to be picked up by satellite increased the likelihood that it was caused by a manmade device, but a mechanical failure was still possible, the paper quoted a military intelligence official as saying. Images of the wreckage appear to show the skin of the fuselage peeling outwards, which some sources suggest points to an on-board explosion.
The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti quoted an unnamed investigator as saying that the pattern of injuries to passengers could indicate that a strong explosion occurred on the plane before it hit the ground.
Investigators have yet to officially release data or findings, but according to unverified reports from Russia, cockpit recordings reveal unusual sounds at the moment the plane went off the radar and confirm there was no distress call from the pilots.
