Obama Says "It Is Certainly Possible" There Was a Bomb Aboard Russian Plane
In a radio interview on Thursday, President Obama said that there was a “possibility” that a terrorist bomb caused the destruction of the Russian Metrojet airliner over the Sinai Peninsula this weekend.
According to the New York Times, Obama was circumspect, saying that there may have been a bomb but not going so far as to say it was likely.
“I don’t think we know yet,” he told Seattle radio station KIRO. “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. I think there is a possibility that there was a bomb on board. And we are taking that very seriously.”
“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. But it is certainly possible that there was a bomb on board.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron went a bit further, the Associated Press reports. “We don’t know for certain that it was a terrorist bomb,” he said, but it’s a “strong possibility.”
Russian and Egyptian officials have been less inclined to indulge speculation about the possibility of a terrorist attack. “The investigation team does not have yet any evidence or data confirming this hypothesis,” Egyptian Minister of Civil Aviation Hossam Kamal said.
“One cannot rule out a single theory, but at this point there are no reasons to voice just one theory as reliable—only investigators can do that,” as spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, said.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that, if Britain has information indicating that there was a bomb on the plan, it’s “really shocking” that that information has not shared.
Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.