The Airbus A 321 plunged to the ground on Saturday 23 minutes after taking off from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh on a flight to St Petersburg.
Experts have said the fact that debris and bodies were strewn over a large area were signs the plane broke up in mid-air, a rare but not unprecedented event.
A militant group affiliated with IS has claimed it brought down the plane.
Intelligence analysis has ruled out a missile strike, but US officials told CNN and other US television networks that a military satellite detected a heat flash at the time of the crash.
That could point to a catastrophic event during flight, possibly the result of a bomb explosion although analysts were considering a range of possible causes, CNN said.
Among other possibilities cited by the CNN report were the explosion of a malfunctioning engine, a fire caused by a structural problem on the plane or wreckage hitting the ground.
Investigators on Tuesday began examining the plane’s two black boxes, one of which recorded on-board conversations and the other flight data, Egyptian civil aviation officials said.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has dismissed the missile strike claim as IS “propaganda,” said it would take time to establish the cause of the crash.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday it was inappropriate to link the crash to Russia’s military strategy in Syria.
Some have also pointed to a 2001 incident, when the Airbus 321’s tail section struck the tarmac on landing, as a possible cause of structural weakness.
Unusual sounds were recorded in the cockpit as the Russian passenger jet crashed, sources told Russia’s Interfax news agency on Tuesday.
“Before the moment of the disappearance of the aircraft from radar screens, sounds are recorded which are not characteristic of a normal flight,” Interfax quoted an unnamed security source in Cairo assaying.
The source said that, shortly beforehand, there were normal conversations between pilots and air-traffic controllers with no evidence of irregularities during the flight. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al Sissi said any rocket claims by IS were nonsense. “When there is propaganda that it crashed because of ISIS, this is one way to damage the stability and security of Egypt and the image of Egypt,” he told the BBC.
“Believe me, the situation in Sinai especially in this limited area is under our full control,” he said. Russia continued to bring bodies of the victims home on Tuesday.“We will do this work every day until all the dead and their belongings have been brought back,” the deputy head of Russia’s Civil Protection Agency, Vladimir Stepanov, told the Itar-Tass news agency. — Agencies
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