No survivors found in Red Sea plane crash

A charter airliner carrying 148 people – mostly French tourists – crashed into the Red Sea today after taking off from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, officials said.

There were no reports of survivors.

The military sent helicopters and small patrol boats into an area full of floating suitcases and other debris from the wreckage of the Boeing 737 jet that went down a little before 5am local time (3am Irish time), but no survivors had been found seven hours after the crash.

Search teams pulled one body from the water.

After the jet took off, en route for Paris with a stop scheduled in Cairo for a crew change, it quickly disappeared from radar south of the airport, said airport officials using customary anonymity.

There was no distress call from the jet, operated by small charter carrier Air Flash, the officials said.

The crash happened amid a week of heightened concerns about terrorist threats from the air that have led to increased security and cancelled flights around the world.

But an initial statement from Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry ruled out terrorism, calling the crash an ”accident” that may have been caused by a mechanical problem.

A French Embassy official in Cairo said he had a list of people aboard that showed 134 French tourists, one Moroccan tourist and 13 crew members.

Air Flash said in a statement that the wreckage was found about nine miles from the airport, according to the Egyptian news agency MENA.

Emergency teams found the wreckage of the jet close to the coast in an area of the sea filled with floating debris from the crash, according to MENA. They were attempting to locate survivors but did not find any in the first hours of their search, according to an official quoted by MENA.

One body was recovered, MENA said.

A German who runs a diving centre in Sharm el-Sheikh described Egyptian Navy ships and helicopters combing the crash site, which he called one of the deepest parts of the sea in the area, but “nothing has surfaced so far”.

“Nobody heard a crash or an explosion,” Mark Marger said.

Engineers from the national carrier EgyptAir were helping to determine what happened.

Air Flash said the 737 was one of just two it owned. The company said it had been in business for six years, but provided few other details in its statement carried by MENA.

The weather was clear in Sharm el-Sheikh and other flights were taking off without incident, officials said.

The Boeing 737 had flown in early today from Italy, dropping off passengers in Sharm el-Sheikh.

The new passengers then boarded for the flight to Paris via Cairo.

Sharm el-Sheik is a popular Red Sea tourist resort that also frequently hosts major political and economic summits, and the Prime Minister Tony Blair is now on holiday there. It is about 300 miles southeast of Cairo on the Sinai peninsula.

Today a Downing Street spokesman stressed that Mr Blair and his family were safe and well. The spokesman said: “The group has not been affected.”

Egypt has held several meetings on peace in the Middle East in Sharm el-Sheikh, including one in which US President George W. Bush met regional leaders in June over the “road map” plan toward creating a Palestinian state.