A Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula broke up in mid-air, an official of a Moscow-based aviation agency said yesterday after visiting the disaster site, but stressed it was too early to draw conclusions from this.

A woman lays flowers outside Pulkovo airport in St Petersburg, Russia, yesterday on a makeshift memorial for victims of a Russian airliner which crashed in Egypt. Photo: Peter Kovalev/Reuters

Russian authorities also ordered Kogalymavia airline, operator of the Airbus A321 which came down on Saturday killing all 224 people on board, not to fly its jets of the same model until the causes of the crash are known.

The jet, which Kogalymavia flew under the brand name Metrojet, was carrying holidaymakers from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg when it crashed into a mountainous area of central Sinai shortly after losing radar contact near cruising altitude.

“The destruction happened in the air, and fragments were scattered over a large area of around 20 square kilometres,” said Viktor Sorochenko, director of the Intergovernmental Aviation Committee. However, he warned against reading anything into this information. “It’s too early to talk about conclusions,” he said on Russian television from Cairo.

The Moscow-based committee represents governments of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which groups Russia and other former Soviet republics.

Militant group affiliated to Islamic State says it brought down plane in response to Russian airstrikes in Syria

Egyptian analysts began examining the contents of the two “black box” recorders recovered from the airliner although the process, according to a civil aviation source, could take days. However, Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov told Russia 24 TV that this work had not yet started.

A militant group affiliated to Islamic State in Egypt said in a statement that it brought down the plane “in response to Russian airstrikes that killed hundreds of Muslims on Syrian land”, but Sokolov told Interfax news agency the claim “can’t be considered accurate”.

A child’s shoe among the debris from the Russian airliner.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said it could take months to establish the truth behind the crash. The wreckage was found in a desolate area of stony ground.

Rescuers had collected the colourful suitcases of the passengers into a pile. A pink child’s sandal decorated with white flowers lay among the debris, a reminder that 17 children were among those killed as they headed home from their holidays.

Parts of the wreckage were blackened and charred, with one section forming heaps of twisted metal.

Those on board the doomed flight included 214 Russians, at least three Ukrainians and one Belarusian, most returning from the Red Sea.

Russian transport prosecutors have already examined the quality of the fuel used by the airliner and found that it met necessary requirements, Russia’s state-run RIA news agency said. The crew had also undergone medical tests recently and no problems were detected, Interfax reported.

Russia, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, launched air raids against opposition groups in Syria including Islamic State on September 30. Islamic State, the ultra-hardline group that controls large parts of Iraq and Syria, has called for a holy war against both Russia and the US in response to airstrikes on its fighters in Syria.