EgyptAir Flight MS804 wreckage found as U.S. officials eye possible bomb

Investigators said they found debris in the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday from an EgyptAir passenger jet that crashed en route from Paris to Cairo in what may have been a terror attack.

Wreckage from Flight MS804 was found near the Greek island of Karpathos, Egypt's ministry of civil aviation said, according to an EgyptAir Facebook post.

A Greek military ship found two large plastic objects floating in the water which may have come from the plane, Greek military officials had said.

Flight MS804, a 12-year-old Airbus 320, disappeared from the radar of Greek air traffic control shortly after it entered Egyptian airspace around 2:45 a.m. Thursday, prompting a search and rescue attempt. Controllers last spoke to the pilot about 25 minutes before the plane disappeared from radar, with no suggestion of a problem, Constantine Litzerakos, Greek civil aviation chief, told Antenna TV.

"An informed source at EGYPTAIR stated that Flight No. MS804, which departed Paris at 23:09 [11:09 p.m.], heading to Cairo has disappeared from radar," the airline tweeted early Thursday.

A Greek Ministry of Defense official told ABC News that before contact with the aircraft was lost, it made a 90-degree left turn, then a 360-degree turn before dropping 20,000 feet in altitude.

Rescue teams were sent to look for the plane and any possible survivors. The U.S. Navy has joined the search, launching from Sicily Thursday afternoon.

The plane, which departed Wednesday night from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, carried 56 passengers, two pilots, five cabin crew members and three security personnel. There were 30 Egyptians on board as well as 15 from France, two from Iraq, andone each from Britain, Belgium, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Chad, Portugal, Algeria and Canada.

U.S. officials reportedly suspect a bomb may have been responsible for the crash, though the official cause of the crash has yet to be determined. Egyptian officials said they have not ruled out technical problems.

A statement from French President Francois Hollande's office said, "A crisis cell was actioned immediately," raising the suggestion terrorism was involved in the loss of the plane.

"If you analyze the situation properly, the possibility ... of having a terror attack is higher than having a technical" failure, Sherif Fathy said, adding, "I don't want to go into speculations or assumptions."

Greece sent military aircraft and a frigate to search for the plane. A directive from Egypt's National Security Council, issued after a meeting of the council with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, ordered Egyptian military aircraft and vessels to continue search efforts.

There are conflicting reports by EgyptAir and the Egyptian Army of whether a signal has been received from the plane's "black box" flight data recorder.

The Paris Prosecutor's office has begun an inquiry into the plane's disappearance, the newspaper Le Figaro reported Thursday.

source: UPI