A Russian cargo plane brought the first bodies of Russian victims killed in the crash to St. Petersburg, where many of them are from. The city, awash in grief for its missing residents, is holding three days of mourning through Tuesday.
The government plane brought 140 bodies to St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport, touching down in the dark. The bodies were then taken to a city morgue and a crematorium, where Russian forensic experts immediately began working to identify the victims, said Yulia Shoigu, a Russian Emergency Situations official.
The search for bodies at the Sinai crash site should wrap up late Monday night and another plane with more crash victims’ bodies will then travel from Cairo to St. Petersburg, Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Puchkov told a televised news conference.
President Vladimir Putin declared Sunday a nationwide day of mourning and flags flew at half-staff across the country.
Mourners have been coming to St. Petersburg’s airport since Saturday with flowers, pictures of the victims, stuffed animals and paper planes. Others went to churches and lit candles in memory of the dead.
In the Sinai, aviation experts and search teams have been combing a 16 square kilometer area (more than 6 square miles) to find bodies and pieces of the jet. The Egyptian government said Sunday that 163 bodies had been recovered.
Russia has sent over 100 emergency workers to Egypt to help with the investigation into the crash, and aviation teams from France, Germany and Airbus are also working in Egypt.
Smirnov, Metrojet’s deputy director, described the A321 as a reliable aircraft that would not fall into a spin even if the pilots made a grave error because its automatic systems would correct crew mistakes.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi cautioned that the cause of the crash may not be known for months.
“It’s very important that this issue is left alone and its causes are not speculated on,” he told a meeting of top government officials. The investigation “will take a long time” and “needs very advanced technologies.”
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