Conflicting reports about the alleged cause of EgyptAir Flight 804’s crash while en route from Paris to Cairo last Thursday have provided more questions than answers. Human remains, luggage and debris from the plane were located by the Egyptian military, and an ongoing investigation is racing against the clock to determine the specific crash site. Yet separate accounts by Greek and Egyptian authorities have already cast doubt on the nature of the plane’s demise, and with medical officials denying a new report by the Associated Press that the recovered remains exhibit evidence of an explosion, the more pertinent questions likely won’t be answered for some time.
According to the AP, an unidentified “senior Egyptian forensics official” revealed that many of the remains recovered were awash in small, similar burn marks. As a result, said official suggested, “The logical explanation is that an explosion brought it down”:
The Egyptian expert told the AP that all 80 pieces that have been brought to Cairo so far are very small. “There isn’t even a whole body part, like an arm or a head,” said the official, adding that one piece was the left part of a head.
He said the body parts are “so tiny” and that at least one piece of a human arm has signs of burns — an indication it might have “belonged to a passenger sitting next to the explosion.”
“But I cannot say what caused the blast,” he said.
The unconfirmed report came amidst a volley of mudslinging between Egyptian and Greek authorities who were debating whether or not Flight 804 made a violent swerve just before disappearing from the latter’s radar screens. When news of the incident first broke on Thursday, Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos told the press that the aircraft “swerved 90 degrees left and then 360 degrees to the right” as it plummeted 20,000 feet down into the Mediterranean. Soon after, Egypt rebutted Kammenos and asked the media to avoid any speculation during the investigation’s earliest moments.
Officials did much of the same in response to the AP’s breaking news on Tuesday. Soon after the anonymous “senior Egyptian forensics official” was quoted as suggesting an explosion had taken down Flight 804, the head of the country’s forensic medical department issued a statement on Facebook claiming that the report had “circulated wrong information.”
The statement said the reports were “baseless, and it is speculation that has not come from the Forensic Medical Department or any forensic doctor among its employees.”
It urged news outlets to “avoid chaos and spreading false rumors” that damaged the “state’s high interests and national security.
The original AP article was subsequently updated to reflect the new statement’s condemnation, but the original report was left as is. That’s because, as the news agency told NBC, they were “standing by” their unidentified source within Egypt’s forensics team.
(Via Associated Press, CNN and NBC News)