Sinai plane crash: Victims flown back to Russia

All 224 people on the plane - most of them Russians - died when it came down over the northern Sinai peninsula.

The country observed a day of mourning on Sunday after its worst air disaster.

Russian Air Transport Agency head Aleksandr Neradko has said the airliner disintegrated at high altitude.

Debris was found across a 20sq km-wide area of Sinai, officials said. So far 163 bodies have been found.

The Kogalymavia Airbus A321 came down early on Saturday, shortly after leaving the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for the Russian city of St Petersburg.

Jihadists allied to so-called Islamic State (IS) in Sinai, where such groups are active, made a claim on social media that they had brought down flight KGL9268.

But Egyptian Prime Minister Sharif Ismail said experts had confirmed that a plane could not be downed at 9,450m (31,000ft), the altitude the Airbus 321 was flying at, by weapons the militants are known to possess.

IS has not produced pictures or video footage to substantiate its claim.

Analysis by BBC Monitoring found that a video purporting to show the downing of a plane did not appear to be an official IS clip, and was not shared on official IS channels.

A number of major airlines - Emirates, Air France-KLM, Lufthansa, and Qatar Airways - have decided not to fly over the Sinai Peninsula until more information is available. Two smaller carriers, flydubai and Air Arabia, also said they would re-route flights, while Etihad Airways said it would avoid only "certain areas of airspace" over Sinai.

Germany's transport ministry has told German airlines not to follow the same route taken by the Russian plane.

British Airways said it regularly assessed the safety of its routes. BA said it would not confirm flight routes, but that it "would never fly a route unless it was safe to do so".

Russian and French investigators have joined the Egyptian-led investigation, along with experts from Airbus, which is headquartered in France.

Some bodies had been recovered within a radius of 5km on Saturday, but that of a three-year-old girl was found 8km from the scene, Egyptian officials said.

The plane's flight recorders have been found and sent for analysis.

Russia's transport regulator said on Sunday it would check all the airline's A321 planes, but Kogalymavia said this would not affect their operations.

Egypt's civil aviation minister Hossam Kamal said there had been no sign of any problems on board the flight, contradicting earlier reports that the pilot had asked to make an emergency landing.

An Egyptian ground service official who carried out a pre-flight inspection of the plane said the aircraft appeared to be in good shape

"We are all shocked. It was a good plane. Everything checked out in 35 minutes," the official told AP.

However, the widow of the plane's co-pilot told Russian TV her husband had complained about the aircraft's technical condition.

The plane was carrying 217 passengers, including 25 children, Russian transport authorities said. There were seven crew members on board.

Most of the passengers were Russian, but at least three were Ukrainian and one Belarusian.

The Russian government has said it will pay compensation to the victims' families and help organise funeral procedures.

(BBC)