EgyptAir flight MS804: manslaughter inquiry opens

The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened a manslaughter inquiry into the crash in May of an EgyptAir plane that killed 66 people, saying there is no evidence so far to link it to terrorism.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, said the inquiry was launched on Monday as an accident investigation, not a terrorism investigation. She said authorities were not favouring the theory that the plane had been brought down deliberately.

The decision to open the investigation was based on evidence gathered so far, she said, without elaborating.

The pilots of the aircraft made no distress call, and no group has claimed to have brought down the plane.

The French-manufactured Airbus A320, en route from Paris to Cairo, crashed in the Mediterranean on 19 May. Search teams have recovered its two flight recorders, which arrived in Paris on Monday, where technicians will attempt to repair them.

Both devices were extensively damaged when EgyptAir flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo crashed into the Mediterranean and Egyptian investigators were unable to download information from the recorders.

The Egyptian investigating committee said in a statement that the electronic boards of both the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder had been flown to France.

Read More- The Guardian

Image courtesy of Reuters