French President François Hollande said at a news conference that information gathered pointed to the flight crashing, adding that “no hypothesis should be ruled out.”
“When we have the truth we will draw our conclusions; whether this was an accident or something else, perhaps terrorist,” Hollande said. “We will have the truth.”
Alexander Bortnikov, chief of Russia’s top domestic security agency, said: “In all likelihood it was a terror attack.”
EgyptAir Flight 804, an Airbus A320 with 56 passengers and 10 crew members, went down about halfway between the Greek island of Crete and Egypt’s coastline after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle Airport, authorities said.
Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said the plane spun all the way around and suddenly lost altitude just before vanishing from radar screens around 2:45 a.m. Egyptian time.
He said it made a 90-degree left turn, then a full 360-degree turn toward the right, plummeting from 38,000 to 15,000 feet. It disappeared at about 10,000 feet, he said.
The plane’s erratic course suggested a number of possibilities, including some kind of catastrophic mechanical or structural failure—whether accidental or the result of sabotage—or a struggle over the controls with a hijacker in the cockpit.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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