Free Republic

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) - France said on Monday it attached little credence to a previously unknown Islamic group's claim to have brought down a plane that crashed off Egypt, killing 133 French tourists and 15 other people. Egypt again defended the safety record of Flash Airlines, operators of the Boeing 737 that plunged into the Red Sea on Saturday, but Switzerland issued a fresh statement that it had banned the Egyptian company from its airspace on safety grounds. French civil aviation authority head Michel Wachenheim said France's own checks on the doomed plane had showed "nothing abnormal." An anonymous...

An anonymous caller claiming to represent a previously unknown Islamic group says they brought down the Egyptian plane which crashed into the Red Sea on Saturday, killing 148 people. The man told an international news agency in Cairo that the Yemen-based group Ansar al-Haq (Followers of the Truth) would also attack Air France planes unless the French government drops plans to ban Islamic headscarves from state schools. There was no way to check the claim of the caller, who said he was an Egyptian member of the group. The Egyptian government has ruled out a deliberate attack on the Boeing...