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EgyptAir Denies MS804 Earlier Sent Technical Warnings | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Recovered debris of the EgyptAir plane that crashed in the Mediterranean Sea. Reuters


EgyptAir’s chairman on Thursday denied media reports that the airliner which crashed into the Mediterranean last month, killing all 66 on board, had sent technical warnings during flights in the 24 hours before it disappeared from radar screens.

“For me it is not true,” Safwat Musallam said when asked about the French media reports.

Musallam said flight MS804, which disappeared from radar en route to Cairo from Paris, had not experienced any maintenance issues before departure and that the plane, an Airbus A320 was “normal.”

“We fully trust the aircraft and the pilot,” he said on the sidelines of the IATA annual meeting in Dublin.

The search zone for the crashed EgyptAir jet in the Mediterranean has been narrowed to 2 km from 5 km, an Egyptian source on the investigation committee said on Thursday.

The French ship Laplace searching the sea has detected black box signals from the missing plane in the waters between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast.

The Egyptian agency leading the inquiry into the crash said the ship had received signals “from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders.”

So far, only small pieces of debris and human remains have been retrieved from the crash site.

No terrorist group has claimed responsibility, though Egypt’s civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, has said terrorism is a more likely cause than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event.

The flight recorders will be critical to determining whether the disaster was caused by an accident or a deliberate act.