Lufthansa cancels subsidiaries’ flights to Sharm el Sheik after crash

Germany’s Lufthansa Group announced Thursday it would cancel flights of its Edelweiss and Eurowings subsidiary airlines to the Egyptian city of Sharm el Sheik, where a Russia charter jet took off Saturday before it crashed in the Sinai Peninsula.

Flights to Cairo would not be affected, the company said.

The announcement came a day after Britain canceled flights to and from the Sinai Peninsula, stranding thousands of British tourists at Sharm el Sheik, because of “intelligence and information” indicating that a bomb was the likely culprit in the crash that killed all 224 people aboard.

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British Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday repeated British assertions that it was “more likely than not” that a bomb brought down the Metrojet flight packed with Russian vacationers -- a scenario that officials from Russia and Egypt have tried to dismiss as premature speculation.

A group linked to Islamic State has claimed that it brought down the plane, a report rejected by Russian and Egyptian officials as not credible. Egypt is fighting an Islamic insurgency in the area where the plane crashed.

Cameron said he had “every sympathy” with the Egyptians, who rely heavily on income from tourism, but added that he had to “put the safety of British people first.”

“We don’t know for certain that it was a terrorist bomb ... [but it’s a] strong possibility,” Cameron said at his London office at 10 Downing St. shortly before a previously scheduled meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi. “There’s still an investigation taking place in Egypt. We need to see the results of that investigation.”

He said he would call Russian President Vladimir Putin later Thursday to discuss the crash.

A British team is working to tighten security at the Sharm el Sheik airport with an eye toward resuming flights to the Red Sea resort area. Cameron said that “we want to start as soon as possible” to bring tourists home, and empty planes will be flying out from Britain to do that, but it would take some time.

British Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said Egypt will have to put in place tighter long-term security measures before British flights will resume flying. He told the House of Commons on Thursday that British security teams sent to Sharm el Sheik “will be working intensively with the Egyptian authorities to allow normal scheduled operations to recommence.”

McLoughlin said short-term measures, including different luggage-handing arrangements, would allow the estimated 20,000 British citizens in the Sharm el Sheik area, many of them tourists, to fly home.

Egypt’s minister of civil aviation, Hossam Kamal, insisted Thursday that the country’s airports do comply with international security standards and said “the investigation team does not have yet any evidence or data confirming this hypothesis” of a bomb bringing down the plane.

A spokesman for Putin, Dmitry Peskov, insisted that aviation investigators were working on all possible theories as to why the Airbus A321-200 crashed 23 minutes after taking off. He said naming just one possibility was mere speculation.

“One cannot rule out a single theory, but at this point there are no reasons to voice just one theory as reliable -- only investigators can do that,” Peskov told reporters in Moscow.

Metrojet suspended all flights of Airbus A321 jets in its fleet after the crash, the Russian Federal Transport Agency said Thursday. The company has ruled out pilot error or a technical fault as a possible cause of the crash, drawing criticism from Russian officials for speaking with such certainty too soon.

Intercepted communications have played a role in the tentative conclusion that an Islamic State Sinai affiliate planted an explosive device on the plane, said a U.S. official briefed on the matter. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss intelligence matters publicly.

The official and others said there had been no formal judgment rendered by the CIA or other U.S. intelligence agencies, and that forensic evidence from the blast site, including the airplane’s black box, was still being analyzed.

On the ground in the Sinai, rescue teams have retrieved 140 bodies from the scene and more than 100 body parts. Russian rescue workers, combing a 15-square-mile area, should finish their search for remains and wreckage by Thursday evening, a top official said.