It could be weeks before officials know why Egyptair Flight MS804 vanished from the sky on Thursday morning, with 66 people on board. But French authorities have begun hunting for a cause, including the possibility an explosive device might have been placed on board the Paris-Cairo flight at Charles de Gaulle airport, reports Time.
Egyptian aviation minister Sherif Fathy told reporters on Thursday that “the possibility of having… a terror attack is higher than the possibility of having a technical failure.” Fathy did not say how he had reached that conclusion. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in a radio interview early Thursday that his government “cannot rule out any hypothesis.”
Among the many variablesunder scrutiny on Thursday were the employees of Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport, according to sources cited in the media. The Egyptair A320 aircraft landed at the airport from Cairo on Wednesday night, and spent about one hour on the ground before taking off at 11.05 p.m. for its return trip to the Egyptian capital.
A Russian jet was blown up over the Sinai desert in Egypt last year by a bomb apparently placed in the aircraft’s hold by a ground staffer while it was on the tarmacat the country’s Sharm el-Sheikh Airport.
There was no specific information pointing to a security breach at the Paris airport, which handles about 65 million passengers a year; the doomed Egyptair plane had also been at Asmara, Tunis and Cairo airports during the 24 hours before landing in Paris. And aviation experts said Thursday the Paris airport took nearly every measure possible to avoid one.
“The security measures are among the strictest in the world,” aviation specialist Xavier Tytelmann said in an interview on Europe 1 Radio. If a terror attack on the Egyptair plane originated at CDG Airport, he said, “it would be completely incredible, given all the procedures we have in place. That would mean that no country in the world is reliable, because we have the highest standards you can find.”
Armed French soldiers have patrolled the airport’s terminals continually ever since the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks in Paris in January, 2015. Their numbers have increased since the November attacks. In a highly unusual measure, French police meet every flight that lands in Paris from a Middle East country, standing at the jetway and checking every passenger’s passport as they walk off the plane, before allowing them into the airport building. All bags are inspected after passengers drop them on conveyer belts at check-in desks, according to Gérard Feldzer, an aviation consultant and former Air France pilot.
Even so, there have been rising concerns over the past year about the potential security risks among the CDG staff.