NEW YORK, Nov 13: The National Transportation Safety Board investigators said on Tuesday initial information from the cockpit voice recorder found in the wreckage of the American Airlines Airbus indicated Monday’s crash was an accident and not sabotage.

“The cockpit voice recorder is the biggest information that we have and a quick listen to that last evening in Washington showed nothing that would imply any sort of unusual activity in the cockpit other than the accident sequence,” said NTSB spokesman George Black.

Speaking on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show, Mr Black said there were no unknown voices in the cockpit before Flight 587 crashed, just two minutes after taking off from JFK Airport en route to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.

“There was nothing on the tape that would lead us to believe that it was anything other than an aviation accident,” he said, quashing speculation hijackers might have been on board in a repeat of the Sept 11 aerial attacks on America.

Up to 269 people died in the crash in the residential area of Queens in New York. Of those killed, 251 were passengers and nine were crew on board the plane, while nine people are missing on the ground.

The crash came just two months and one day after two hijacked commercial aircraft were rammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, killing some 4,300 people.

However, in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show, Mr Black said the possibility of sabotage could not be ruled out altogether in the case of the American Airlines flight and that the NTSB was cooperating with the FBI. “We are not going to exclude that possibility until the investigation goes much further than this but right now there is no evidence (of sabotage),” he added.