WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama also has joined those who believe that a terrorist bomb brought down a Russian passenger plane in Egypt last week, killing 224 people.

“I think there is a possibility that there was a bomb on board. And we are taking that very seriously,” he said in an interview to Seattle’s KIRO radio.

But unlike his counterparts in Britain, who have ruled out other possibilities, President Obama emphasised the need for further investigation to determine what actually caused the crash.

“I don’t think we know yet,” he said in the interview broadcast on Thursday evening. “Whenever you’ve got a plane crash, first of all you’ve got the tragedy, you’ve got making sure there’s an investigation on site.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron, however, was more certain than the American president: “It is more likely than not” that a bomb brought down Metrojet Flight 9268 over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, he said.

Mr Obama promised that US intelligence agencies would continue to probe the matter until they came up with a definite answer.

“We are going to spend a lot of time making sure our own investigators and our own intelligence community figures out exactly what’s going on before we make any definitive pronouncements,” he said. “But it is certainly possible that there was a bomb on board.”

Reports in the US media, however, claimed that US intelligence agencies were also blaming the Middle East-based terrorist group ISIL for bringing down the plane.

On Friday, CNN reported that it had seen new evidence to suggest that the crash was a terrorist act and not an accident.

Published in Dawn, November 7th, 2015

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