Egyptian robot sub to join search for jet

Brandon Fregeau of the U.S. Navy checks monitors Sunday on board a Navy patrol aircraft from Sigonella, Sicily, searching the area in the Mediterranean Sea where EgyptAir Flight 804 from Paris to Cairo disappeared Thursday.
Brandon Fregeau of the U.S. Navy checks monitors Sunday on board a Navy patrol aircraft from Sigonella, Sicily, searching the area in the Mediterranean Sea where EgyptAir Flight 804 from Paris to Cairo disappeared Thursday.

CAIRO -- Egypt's president said Sunday that a robot submarine belonging to his country's Oil Ministry was headed to the site of the crash of EgyptAir Flight-804 in the eastern Mediterranean to join the search for the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, commonly known as black boxes.

President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi also said Egypt was jointly investigating the Thursday crash with the French government.

"It is very, very important to us to establish the circumstances that led to the crash of that aircraft," he said in comments broadcast live on Egyptian TV channels.

He said the submarine, which can operate at a depth of 9,842 feet below the surface, left for the site Sunday. He gave no further details.

Making his first public comments since the Airbus A320 crashed en route from Paris to Cairo, el-Sissi said it "will take time" to determine the exact cause of the crash, which killed all 66 people on board.

He thanked the nations that have joined Egyptian navy ships and aircraft in the search for the wreckage and began his comments with a minute of silence in remembrance of the victims.

El-Sissi also cautioned the media against premature speculation on the cause of the crash.

"There is not one scenario that we can exclusively subscribe to ... all scenarios are possible," he said.

El-Sissi spoke a day after the leak of flight data showing trouble in the cockpit and smoke in a plane lavatory aboard the doomed aircraft, bringing into focus the final moments of the flight, including a three-minute period before contact was lost as alarms on the plane screeched one after another.

Officials have cautioned that it is still too early to say what happened to the aircraft, but evidence points to a sudden catastrophe that led to the crash.

In Cairo, several hundred mourners attended a memorial service for nine Coptic Christians killed in the crash, including 26-year-old flight attendant Yara Tawfik.

The service was held in the Boutrossiya Church, inside Cairo's St. Mark Cathedral, the seat of Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church.

Relatives sobbed and prayed as Bishop Daniel, the senior cleric who led the service, offered words of comfort on behalf of Pope Tawadros II, leader of the Coptic church.

"The church, the pope, the state and its representatives are very moved by this painful incident and are all standing together in offering their condolences to these families," Daniel said. "They've ascended to heaven."

Nader Medhat, a cousin of Tawfik, said Saturday that he was still trying to come to terms with the disaster.

"We hear about such accidents, a plane falls or explodes, but it is always far away from us, it was always so far-fetched until it happened to us," he said.

A service was held Saturday in a Cairo mosque for co-pilot Mohamed Mamdouh, 25, another of the 30 Egyptians among the dead.

"The funeral service was so packed with people there was no place for anyone to stand," said Ahmed Amin, Mamdouh's childhood friend. "It was really heartwarming."

Six of the victims came from a single village, about 50 miles north of the Egyptian capital, where local men have a tradition of seeking work in France, according to media reports.

In Washington, government officials debated whether the Islamic State or some other terrorist entity had orchestrated the EgyptAir crash.

Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that the preponderance of evidence he had seen suggested terrorism might be less likely than initially thought -- and that if the crash was an act of terror, it was more likely carried out by a "lone actor."

"We've looked at the signals intelligence; we've looked at the manifests," Schiff said on ABC's This Week. "We have not come up with any hard evidence of terrorism as of yet."

Authorities say the plane lurched left, then right, spun all the way around and plummeted 38,000 feet into the sea -- never issuing a distress call.

Investigators have been poring over the plane's passenger list and questioning ground crew at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, where the airplane took off. Besides Egypt, ships and planes from Britain, Cyprus, France, Greece and the United States are helping to search a wide area of sea 180 miles north of the Egyptian port city of Alexandria.

Information for this article was contributed by Declan Walsh, Nour Youssef, Nicola Clark and Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times.

A Section on 05/23/2016

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