148 die as plane crashes in Red Sea

JERUSALEM -- An Egyptian charter plane carrying French tourists plunged into the Red Sea yesterday, killing all 148 people on board, in a crash officials in Cairo attributed to a mechanical failure.

The Boeing 737 took off from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheik at 5 a.m. in clear weather and went down a few minutes later. Egyptian officials said the pilot tried to turn the plane around when he sensed something was wrong but did not send a distress signal.

The crash occurred as airlines around the world are in a heightened state of alert for possible hijackings. Several have canceled flights to the United States recently because of fears that Al Qaeda or other groups would use passenger planes in a terrorist attack.

Raising further concerns was the fact that Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain had been vacationing in Sharm el-Sheik yesterday, though officials in London announced that neither he nor members of his family were aboard the plane.

Ahmed Maher, Egypt's foreign minister, told reporters in Cairo that the crash "is absolutely not the result of a terrorist act," though he did not explain how Egypt had arrived at that view so quickly.

The country's minister of civil aviation, Ahmed Shafeeq, told state-run Egyptian television that the airliner experienced a "malfunction that made it difficult for the crew to . . . save the plane."

Any indication that it was an act of terrorism could devastate Egypt's tourism, which is crucial to its economy.

A spokesman for the French foreign minister identified 133 of the passengers as French tourists and said the flight list included a Moroccan national and 13 Egyptian crew members. The nationality of an additional passenger was not immediately known.

Patrol boats searched the crash site for the plane's flight recorder and other remnants about 9 miles from the airport, while Egyptian helicopters circled overhead. On the surface of the water, suitcases, and debris were scattered over a wide radius.

Among the items, emergency responders said, was a postcard in French that read, "I think this card will arrive after me."

Divers said the plane crashed in one of the deepest points off the coast and could have sunk to 500 meters below the surface. Thirteen bodies were recovered by late yesterday, according to Egyptian television.

It was not immediately clear whether a criminal investigation would be launched. France said it would make resources available to Egyptian authorities "in order to shed light as quickly as possible on this catastrophe that has plunged our country into mourning," according to statement issued by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

But French antiterrorism authorities said a probe was unlikely, because the cause of the crash appeared to be mechanical.

In Washington, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said an American accident investigator would be traveling to Egypt at Cairo's request.

Any investigation would be closely monitored in Israel, where officials have long been concerned terrorists would try to hijack a plane in a neighboring Arab country and crash it into the Jewish state.

"Security people here are certainly worried about that scenario," said Tuvia Livne, who heads a private consulting company on airline security. "I think it's too early to rule out anything."

The plane, which belonged to the Egyptian Flash charter company, had arrived early yesterday from Italy, dropped off passengers in Sharm el-Sheik about 300 miles southeast of Cairo on the Sinai peninsula, and collected new passengers. It was due to make a stop in Cairo on its way to Paris.

The airline, which has been in existence for six years, said the jet had received its maintenance checks in Norway, and the most recent one showed no problems. The plane that crashed was one of two Boeing 737s the company owned.

A few dozen people gathered at the offices of the airline in Cairo, including tearful relatives of the on-board crew.

At Charles de Gaulle airport, outside Paris, authorities shuttled relatives of the French passengers to a nearby hotel and provided details of the crash.

The Associated Press reported that one man in his 50s, looking pale and shaken, rushed to a counter at the airport and said: "My children are at Sharm. How do I find out if they were on the plane?"

President Jacques Chirac of France and Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt, exchanged condolences by telephone. Mubarak had been scheduled to travel to Sharm el-Sheik yesterday to meet Blair.

Sharm el-Sheik, a popular winter resort for scuba divers and sun seekers on Egypt's Red Sea coast, has been the site of several regional peace summits, including one last June.

"After diving all day, we came back and saw there were a lot of boats out in the water in Naama bay looking for the wreckage," said Guy Sanftleben, a British tourist in Sharm el-Sheik on a diving holiday. "When something like this happens in a place where you're staying, it makes you think."

Tourism contributes about $4 billion to the Egyptian economy and accounts for about 11 percent of Egypt's gross domestic product. Tourism employs 2.2 million Egyptians, according to the Ministry of Tourism.

The last major Egyptian airliner disaster occurred Oct. 31, 1999, when an EgyptAir Boeing 767 crashed off of Nantucket, killing all 217 people on board. The United States believes the plane's copilot caused the crash deliberately, but Egypt denies the assertion.

Correspondent Charles Levinson contributed to this report from Cairo. Material from Reuters was included.