LONDON - Britain probed security at Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh airport and scrambled Thursday to repatriate thousands of its tourists as Cairo and Moscow played down the notion that a bomb downed a Russian plane.
Several European governments said they were reviewing the situation after London suspended all flights in and out of the Red Sea resort, where most tourists are British or Russian.
Prime Minister David Cameron also called an emergency cabinet meeting on how to start repatriating holidaymakers.
The United States and Britain believe a bomb may have downed a Russian tourist plane, which crashed soon after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday bound for Saint Petersburg, killing all 224 people on board.
But Cairo and Moscow contradicted London and Washington’s assessment.
Egypt’s civil aviation minister Hossam Kamal said investigators “have as yet no evidence or data confirming the theory” of a bomb attack. And the Kremlin dismissed any claims over the cause as “speculation”.
“The reasons for what happened can only be put forward by the investigation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists. “Any other proposed explanations seem like unverified information or some sort of speculation.”
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was set to hold long-planned talks with British Prime Minister Cameron in London on Thursday, during his first visit to Britain since he led the army’s overthrow of his predecessor Mohamed Morsi.
Cameron was to chair a meeting of Britain’s emergencies committee beforehand. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Britain was planning emergency measures to repatriate holidaymakers from Sharm el-Sheikh, starting from Friday.
There are an estimated 20,000 Britons currently in the Sinai peninsula resort.
Hammond said the measures “will allow us to screen everything going onto those planes, double-check those planes so we can be confident that they can fly back safely to the UK”.
A small British military team has been sent to the resort as part of the review.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told CNN television it was “somewhat premature” to reach conclusions and suspend flights.
But Hammond said Shoukry “hasn’t seen all the information that we have”.
The Islamic State militant group claims it caused the disaster and said Wednesday it would reveal how at a time of its choosing.
If confirmed, it would be the first time the militant group, which controls large areas of Syria and Iraq, has bombed a passenger plane.
The IS affiliate in Egypt is waging a bloody insurgency in north Sinai that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers.
Egypt is keen to preserve the country’s economically vital tourism sector on the peninsula. Egyptian officials said Wednesday that investigators probing the Russian plane’s black boxes had extracted the data from one of them for analysis, but added the other had been damaged and required a lot of work.
Meanwhile, campaigners opposed to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Thursday blocked the entrance to Downing Street, the London residence of British Prime Minister David Cameron, ahead of a meeting between the two leaders.
Around 200 demonstrators protested against Sisi’s human rights record, but they were outnumbered by those proclaiming support for the Egyptian leader.
Police removed five anti-Sisi protesters dressed in white boiler suits, who lay on the pavement playing dead while blocking the gates to Downing Street.