Wreckage from the missing EgyptAir plane has been found in the Mediterranean sea, 180 miles north of the coastal city of Alexandria, the Guardian reported, citing Egyptian military sources.
The navy had also found some of the passengers’ belongings and was sweeping the area in search of the plane’s black box, the military said.
The statement has not been verified by any of the other countries involved in the search for the plane, which crashed on Thursday morning, while carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew from Paris to Cairo.
Egypt has been leading the search effort, with support from France, Greece and Turkey. The US navy had dispatched a P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft from a base in Sicily.
EgyptAir claimed on Thursday that it had found part of the wreckage and life jackets from MS804 near the island of Karpathos, east of Crete, but the airline’s vice-president, Ahmed Adel, later retracted the statement.
The plane, built in 2003, made “sudden swerves” before dropping off the radar, the Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos had said. It made a 90-degree turn left, and then dropped from 37,000 to 15,000ft before swerving 360 degrees right, he said. Contact was lost at 10,000ft, he said.
Its captain, Mohamed Said Shoukair, had 6,275 flying hours’ experience. He did not send a distress signal.
Egypt’s aviation minister has said the Airbus A320’s sudden disappearance was more likely caused by a terrorist attack than technical failure. Although the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said on Friday that there was “absolutely no indication” of why the flight came down.
No group has claimed responsibility for downing the aircraft and officials from multiple US agencies told Reuters that a preliminary examination of satellite imagery had not shown any signs of an explosion. The anonymous sources said the US had not ruled out any potential causes for the crash, including mechanical failure, terrorism or a deliberate act by the pilot or crew.