A confidential document presented to a French court contradicts Egypt’s terrorism allegations.
The 2016 crash of EgyptAir flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo, which Egyptian authorities initially described as an act of terrorism, was caused by a pilot smoking a cigarette, an investigation has found.
The jet disappeared in the Mediterranean between Crete and the coast of northern Egypt on May 19, 2016, carrying 66 passengers and crew, all of whom perished. It took a month to find the wreck.
Egyptian investigators initially said they found traces of explosives in the remains of victims of the flight. Cairo’s Attorney General ordered an urgent state security investigation, but the results were never made public.
A confidential 134-page investigative document compiled by French experts and sent to the Paris Court of Appeal now traces the cause of the crash to the pilots’ cigarette smoking.
According to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the co-pilot’s oxygen mask was left in “emergency” mode instead of “normal” mode by a maintenance technician.
The cigarette caused the oxygen to burn and provoked a spark that resulted in a fire. Just before the disappearance, the plane’s detection system warned of smoke coming from the front of the plane, the report said.
The ACARS system, which transmits short messages between aircraft and ground stations, sent out seven messages in two seconds, including a warning of a malfunction in a computer system critical to its flight maneuvering mechanisms.
Neither pilot Mohammed Saied Ali Shokair nor co-pilot Mohammed Ahmed Mamdouh Assem asked for help, the report said.
At the time of the crash, authorities were on high alert following the terrorist attacks on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris and Brussels.
Because of the terrorism allegations, the Egyptian authorities have not made their findings public and have not prepared a report within a year, as required by international law.
France’s Civil Aviation Safety Investigation and Analysis Bureau (BEA) has analyzed the plane’s black box, but intergovernmental agreements prevent French authorities – who are not officially in charge of the investigation – from revealing any information.
According to the Convention on International Civil Aviation (ICAO), the country responsible for the investigation must submit a public report within 12 months of the incident. If this is not possible, it must publish a preliminary report on each anniversary of the event.
Egyptian authorities never released their findings, while French authorities were unable to disclose any information, although 15 French nationals were killed in the crash.
A source close to the French investigation was quoted by the media in May 2017 as saying that no traces of explosives were found on the remains of French victims on board the plane.
In a rare public statement, BEA said in July 2018 that “the most likely hypothesis is that a fire started in the cockpit during the voyage period and spread rapidly, resulting in loss of aircraft control.”
However, it was “necessary to have a final report on the incident in order to be able to present disagreements to the Egyptian authorities, as stipulated by international regulations”.
The victims’ families have long clamored for answers to their many questions. “Six years later, we’re still caught between wanting to know the truth and feeling exhausted because things aren’t progressing as they should,” said Julie Heslouin, who killed both her brother and hers in the crash Father lost to Corriere della Sera.
“We want to know why we lost loved ones, and to this day we still don’t know.”