Posted on 01/03/2004 1:06:18 AM PST by kattracks
CAIRO (Reuters) - An Egyptian Boeing 737 airliner has crashed into the Red Sea after take-off from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 135 passengers and six crew, an aviation ministry source says. The source said 127 of the passengers on the plane, bound for Cairo, were French. Egypt's official news agency MENA said the plane disappeared shortly after take-off at 2.44 a.m. British time on Saturday.It crashed into the sea seven miles south of Sharm el-Sheikh, a popular diving and swimming resort at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula, the source said.
An official of Flash Airlines, the private company which owned the plane, gave slightly different figures -- 135 passengers, all of them French, and an Egyptian crew of 13, making a total of 148.
"All we know right now is that a plane disappeared two minutes after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh on its way to Cairo. The flight number was 8604," said the official, who asked not to be named.
At the French embassy in Cairo, a diplomat said the French authorities had confirmed the plane crashed.
"We are still waiting for any more details... We were told that there were 134 people on board," said the diplomat, who asked not to be named.
The agency MENA quoted an official source as saying the plane had been located in the Red Sea off Sharm el-Sheikh and that efforts were under way to find the victims.
There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash but an official source at the Civil Aviation Ministry said the plane appeared to have had an accident.
The last major crash by an Egyptian plane took place in May 2002, when a Boeing 767 of the state airline EgyptAir crashed near Tunis airport, killing 15 people.
In October 1999, an EgyptAir Boeing 767 dived into the sea off Nantucket, Massachusetts, killing all 217 people on board.
On Christmas Day, a Beirut-bound Boeing 727 smashed into the Atlantic after take-off from Benin, killing 138 people.
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Tony Blair just holiday'd there last week. How very odd.
And they are not very good at the coverup thing in Egypt, either: "There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash but an official source at the Civil Aviation Ministry said the plane appeared to have had an accident.
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