Russia has dismissed any theories about what caused the Russian plane to crash in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as “speculation” after British and US officials said a bomb may have brought down the plane.
Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesperson, said on Thursday that only the official investigation can determine what happened.
He said “any other proposed explanations seem like unverified information or some sort of speculation”.
Peskov also said Russian planes were continuing to fly to and from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, despite Ireland and Britain suspending flights.
His comments came a day after Philip Hammond, UK foreign secretary, said that there was a “significant possibility” the crash was caused by a bomb.
After a meeting on Wednesday of the British government’s crisis committee, COBRA, Hammond said Britain was advising its citizens not to go on vacation to Sharm el-Sheikh, which is visited by hundreds of thousands of Britons a year.
Intercepted communications played a role in the tentative conclusion that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group’s Sinai affiliate planted an explosive device on the plane, a US official briefed on the matter told Associated Press news agency.
The US and British security sources, however, stressed they had reached no final conclusions about the crash, as forensic evidence from the blast site, including the airplane’s black box, was still being analysed.
Meanwhile, Russian and Egyptian investigators said that the cockpit voice recorder of the Metrojet Airbus A321-200 had suffered substantial damage in the weekend crash that killed 224 people. -Aljazeera.
