- SHARM EL-b, Egypt
(Reuters) - A team of French experts is expected in Egypt on Sunday with
special equipment to track down the flight recording device of an Egyptian
plane that crashed killing all 148 people on board.
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- The Boeing 737 crashed into the Red Sea off the resort
of Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday, shortly after takeoff. Most of the dead
were French tourists on New Year holidays.
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- Search and rescue teams made slow progress as they trawled
the waters of the Red Sea.
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- The governor of the Egyptian province of South Sinai,
which includes the swimming and diving resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, said
the teams had picked up pieces of 12 or 13 bodies so far. They are expected
to resume work at daybreak on Sunday.
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- The rescue teams will also be seeking clues as to what
went wrong on board the airliner, operated by the private Egyptian charter
company Flash Airlines.
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- The plane disappeared from radar screens minutes after
take-off from Sharm el-Sheikh early on Saturday en route for Paris with
133 French tourists. It was also carrying a Moroccan woman, a Japanese
woman and 13 Egyptian crew members, some of them off duty.
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- The French experts will use their equipment to locate
the flight recorders, believed to be resting hundreds of feet under the
sea -- far too deep for divers to reach them.
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- A spokeswoman for U.S. company Boeing, makers of the
11-year-old plane, said its investigators were heading for the crash site.
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- "It's too early to speculate as to what happened...even
though the reports are saying it was mechanical," she said.
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- Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Ahmed Mohamed Shafiq
Zaki said the cause of the crash was "entirely technical" and
that technical problems might also account for the failure of the pilots
to tell the control tower they were in trouble.
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- Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said there was nothing to
suggest a terrorist attack, despite heightened alerts in Europe and the
United States over Christmas and the New Year.
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- A deliberate attack could have devastated the Egyptian
tourist industry, which has started to recover from the damage inflicted
by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March.
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- British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his family were
on holiday in the Red Sea resort at the time of the accident.
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- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a frequent visitor
to Sharm el-Sheikh, met Blair in the town on Saturday, officials said.
The two men discussed the Middle East peace process and Iraq.
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- From first light on Saturday, Egyptian military planes
and ships, with help from dozens of diving boats, went out to search the
crash site for possible survivors and wreckage.
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- But members of the rescue teams said that all they found
were pieces of luggage, small broken parts of the plane and mutilated fragments
of the bodies. They found no survivors.
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- It was hard to tell how many bodies had come to the surface
because the pieces were so small, they added.
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- The local governor, Mustafa Afifi, told the official
Egyptian news agency MENA: "Pieces of from 12 to 13 bodies of the
victims have probably been recovered."
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- Afifi said the wreck was 3,000 feet below the surface.
Diving experts said their charts indicated a depth between 2,500 and 3,300
feet.
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- Over the past two decades, the coral reefs and beaches
in the area have become a haven for diving enthusiasts and Europeans seeking
winter sunshine.
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- French Deputy Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau
said the plane may have crashed after turning back toward the airport,
which lies about 10 miles north. Zaki said the pilots may have been planning
to turn back but did not do so.
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- French Justice Minister Dominique Perben asked prosecutors
to open a judicial inquiry for manslaughter.
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- The Egyptian foreign minister told reporters his government
was competent to handle any inquiry, though the French authorities could
make a contribution. "What matters is to find out the truth, and Egypt
has enough capacity and experience to find out the truth of what happened,"
he said.
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