• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Metrojet 9268 - 31 October 2015

A Russian A321 aircraft crashed 23 minutes and 14 seconds after it took off from Sharm el-Sheikh on its way to St. Petersburg on 31 October 2015. Metrojet flight 9268 was a chartered flight carrying Russian men, women and children home from their holidays near the Red Sea. The death of all 224 people on board the Metrojet flight came over the Sinai with the plane having reached an altitude of 31,000 ft.

US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron have both said it is certainly possible the plane was bombed. Obama said "... it's certainly possible that there was a bomb on board." Cameron said he thought it was "more likely than not" that a bomb brought the Russian jet down. "There are no technical failures that could lead to the plane breaking up in the air," as it did, Aleksander Smirnov, the airline’s deputy director for aviation, said at a packed news conference in Moscow.

1. The forward fuselage and the wings landed as a single piece, and the tail-cone landed intact some distance away. The aft fuselage was not in evidence, suggesting it had been blown to smithereens by a bomb.
2. Debris was scattered over a 13-kilometer-wide area on the ground, confirming that the aircraft shattered into pieces at high altitude.
3. A US satellites detected a flash of heat in the atmosphere at the time and place where the passenger jet dropped out of the sky. Authorities ruled out the possibility that a missile hit the aircraft before it broke into pieces and plunged 9,400 meters to the Sinai desert, killing all 224 people aboard. Neither a missile launch nor engine burn has been detected.
4. The US intelligence community intercepted a message from a Sinai group affiliated with Islamic State that warned of "something big in the area" before jet crash. A US official said intercepted communications point to Islamic State and that someone inside the Sharm el-Sheikh airport helped plant the bomb. The “chatter” was picked up by one of the most important of the overseas listening stations run by Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ at Mount Troodos, in Cyprus. What was described as “chatter” between Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) leaders in Raqqa, Syria and jihadists in the Sinai Peninsula included a boast that they had taken down the aircraft.
5. The sound of an explosion could be heard on the instruments recovered from the Russian airliner. The explosive sound was recorded on the cockpit voice recorder. Tthe flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder show everything was normal aboard the Russian Metrojet. Then 24 minutes into the flight, "suddenly there was nothing" with one of the boxes registering a loud sound and a "violent, sudden end," strongly indicating that a bomb went off.
6. The cabin was riddled with impacts from the interior which sometimes caused holes, which leads to the supposition that there was an explosion in the plane.
7. The results of a forensic medical examination allegedly stated that the passengers “in the tail section of the liner died because of so-called blast injuries.” Burns covered over 90 percent of the victims’ bodies, which were pierced by particles of metal and aircraft covering, according to the report. An Egyptian doctor who had examined the victims’ bodies suggested that “a powerful explosion took place aboard the plane before it hit the ground.” The nature of the injuries led him to make such a claim
8. A British tourist described security at Sharm el-Sheikh airport as being so lax that he was able to pay to avoid proper procedures.

Russia halted flights to Egypt amid growing fears that the Russian jet that crashed on October 31 over the Sinai peninsula with 224 people on board was bombed. Russia sent a fleet of 44 planes to Egypt on 07 November 2015 to help repatriate some 80,000 tourists left stranded after Moscow cancelled all flights to the country in the wake of last weekend’s jet crash in the Sinai peninsula, officials said. Thirty empty planes would be sent to Hurghada, and 14 would be sent to Sharm El-Sheikh, the two Red Sea resorts where most Russian holidaymakers are staying.

An Isis affiliate, Sinai Province, which has killed hundreds of Egyptian security personnel since the army deposed Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, claimed responsibility for blowing up the plane, but had not given any proof. Islamic State has threatened attacks against Russia, as well as the United States, in retaliation for airstrikes aimed at the militant group's fighters in Syria and Iraq. It was to be expected after the Russian military was deployed to Syria.

Simon Tisdall wrote "... by making an enemy of Isis, Putin has put Russia directly in the firing line. This will not go down well with the Russian public.. Body bags, military and civilian, bring back bad memories for Russians of the disastrous war in Afghanistan in the 1980s."

The Economist's Edward Lucas wrote that as the apparent bombing of a flight from Sharm el-Sheikh shows, the enmity Vladimir Putin has aroused among Islamists will be longlasting " Brilliant tactics, lousy strategy. As the likelihood rises that an Islamist bomb killed 224 people on the Russian Metrojet airline, that would seem a suitable epitaph for Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria – and indeed for his 16-year rule over Russia, in which the storyline has mattered far more than the facts. ... The Kremlin’s propaganda channels feted the air-strikes against Syrian rebels as a sign that the country was once again a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. "

On November 17, 2015 the head of Russia's security service said the deadly plane crash in Egypt's Sinai region was a terrorist act and that explosives were found on both the wreckage and luggage from the aircraft. Federal Security Service (FSB) chief Alexander Bortnikov said the blast came from an improvised explosive device made with up to 1 kilogram of TNT. The FSB also announced a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible. Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to find and punish whoever was responsible and called on the country's partners to help identify the culprits.