Wreaths scattered for plane crash victims

French and Egyptian officials laid wreaths today in an area of the Red Sea where a jet crashed, killing all 148 people aboard.

Search crews on military and civilian vessels also resumed their efforts to recover bodies, the flight data recorder and the fuselage of the plane, believed resting in 2,600ft of water. But the extreme depth was hampering those efforts, and only small pieces of wreckage and body parts from the shark-infested waters near the resort of Sharm el-Sheik have been found.

France joined the recovery effort by dispatching three aircraft with 50 experts, a military surveillance plane, a naval frigate, 16 scuba divers and a robot submarine. Of the 148 passengers who perished, there were 133 French tourists, a Japanese, a Moroccan and 13 Egyptian crew members.

French Deputy Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier told reporters there was nothing to suggest that terrorism was the cause of Saturday’s crash of Flash Airlines Flight FSH604, which had just taken off from Sharm el-Sheik on its way to Paris when it crashed.

“We should not be talking at all about terrorism,” Muselier said. “It appears to have been an accident.”

Egyptian officials have said preliminary information indicates the crash was apparently caused by a mechanical problem. Radar images showed the plane turned left as normal after takeoff, straightened out and then turned right before plunging into the sea.

Egypt has said the Flash Airlines jet, an 11-year-old Boeing 737, had checked out fine before the flight. But Swiss officials said today that technical problems forced them to ban the Egyptian company’s planes from landing in Switzerland.

“A series of safety shortcomings showed up in a plane of Flash Airlines during a routine security check at Zurich Airport in October 2002,” said Celestine Perissinotto, a spokeswoman for the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Aviation.

Egyptian Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafeeq called the charge ”baseless”.

“If they have any proof, they have to submit it,” he told reporters.

Perissinotto said the Swiss report had been given to Egyptian civil aviation authorities. “Since then we have had no reaction,” Perissinotto said.

Flash Airlines’ chief pilot Hassan Mounir denied the Swiss ban stemmed from safety concerns, claiming “it was a financial problem”.

But Mounir confirmed Italian press reports that a Flash plane caught fire while flying over Greece the same month as the Zurich airport inspection. Italian tourists recalled seeing flames coming out of the starboard engine on a flight from Sharm el-Sheik to Bologna, Italy, on October 27, 2002. The plane landed at Athens airport with fire engines alongside the runway.

“To say that the plane was decrepit would be a compliment,” passenger Eugenio Gedda told Italian state television.

“It’s normal,” Mounir said. “You can have an engine fire in flight.”

Mounir could not say if the fire occurred on the same plane that crashed on Saturday. Flash Airlines, which has been in business six years, operated two Boeing 737s.

Asked whether the fire and Zurich inspection raised questions about the standard of maintenance at Flash Airlines, Mounir replied: “No, our planes are very well maintained.”

Flash Airlines’ remaining plane, also an 11-year-old Boeing 737, flew tourists from France to Cairo today, according to airport officials. It was not clear how many passengers were on board.

Muselier told reporters in Sharm el-Sheik that about 60% of the passengers from the crashed plane had been picked up, but that the remains were so badly mangled that it would be difficult to identify them.

“We were able to see the bags full of body parts,” Muselier said, choking back tears after visiting a hospital morgue. “It was terrible to see.”

In a solemn, brief ceremony out at sea, the dead were bid a final farewell. French, Egyptian and Japanese officials led a convoy of three tourist ferries filled with journalists to the site where the plane went down.

There, they held three bouquets, wrapped at the stem with the French, Egyptian and Japanese flags, upside down and let them slip into the water, as helicopters flew overhead.