A terrorist attack after all

Russia now says the plane crash in Egypt was the result of a bomb. Here's what we know.

On November 17, the head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Alexander Bortnikov, announced that the cause of the passenger flight crash in Egypt on October 31 was a terrorist attack. Until now, in the three weeks since the tragedy, Russian officials never ruled out the possibility that a bomb brought down the plane, but neither did they treat it as the likeliest scenario. Meanwhile, almost since the beginning, intelligence agencies in the US and UK have expressed near certainly that terrorists are responsible for the crash. Still little is known about the explosion that occurred aboard the plane: Russian officials aren't releasing any details, and the foreign media has relied on anonymous, potentially unreliable sources. Meduza collects what information we know about how exactly terrorists are believed to have detonated a bomb that killed 224 people.

The first reports that a bomb was responsible for the plane crash emerged almost immediately after the incident. Russian and Egyptian officials were just as quick to deny that there was any information to support the idea that it was a terrorist attack, though the nature of the damage to the aircraft (the tail separated from the body of the plane at nearly 30,000 feet) suggests that a bomb may have exploded in midair. By November 3, just four days after the crash, the American private intelligence company Stratfor declared that a terrorist attack was the most plausible explanation for the tragedy. The next day, on November 4, British authorities came to the same conclusion. The international media soon learned that the plane's tail was discovered more than three miles from the rest of the wreckage.

The catastrophe happened instantly. Officially, the plane's two black boxes recorded nothing abnormal during the flight, before they abruptly stopped working 20 minutes after the plane left the runway. According to unverified reports on November 6, the flight recorder at the front of the plane managed to capture the sound of something other than an engine exploding.

Foreign intelligence agencies intercepted a conversation about a terrorist attack in Egypt. The UK decided to halt all flights to Sharm el-Sheikh airport on the basis of an intercepted conversation between Islamists, where militants discussed carrying out terrorist attacks in the Sinai. According to London, the communications (which were intercepted by British and American intelligence agencies) were not connected to ISIL's propaganda claims of responsibility for the attack.

The bomb may have been planted near the plane's fuel supply line. The television station Fox News says its sources claim an explosive device was placed near the aircraft's tail, close to the fuel supply line. This would explain why investigators have been unable to locate any traces of a bomb—it may have been destroyed entirely when the fuel exploded. Fox News also reports that the bomb was equipped with a timer, which was set to count down from two hours. Given that the flight crashed 23 minutes after taking off, it can be assumed that the bomb was loaded onto the plane not long before, when passengers were checking in and handing over their luggage.

The bomb's destructive power was equal to about a kilogram of TNT. Alexander Bornitkov, the head of Russia's Federal Security Service, described the bomb this way in comments to Vladimir Putin before TV cameras on November 17. The day before, Putin is said to have learned this information behind closed doors. Earlier in November, Bornitkov went public with recommendations that Russia suspend all flights to Egypt, due to security concerns related to the plane crash in the Sinai.