"EGYPTAIR sincerely conveys its deepest sorrow to the families and friends of the passengers onboard Flight MS804," the airline tweeted. Planes and ships resumed the search for the wreckage Friday after the jet turned wildly and crashed into the Mediterranean Sea with 66 people aboard the previous day. Egyptian army spokesman Brig. Gen. Mohammed Samir said in a statement posted on his Facebook page Friday that Egyptian planes and navy vessels found “personal belongings of the passengers and parts of the plane debris.” He said a recovery process was under way. EgyptAir said airline officials met with relatives of the passengers and crew at a hotel near Cairo International Airport to inform them of the situation.
The Egyptian Armed Forces have informed EGYPTAIR that they have found first debris from the missing aircraft operating flight MS804 #MS804
— EGYPTAIR (@EGYPTAIR) May 20, 2016
"The presidency with utmost sadness and regret mourns the victims on aboard the EgyptAir flight who were killed after the plane crashed in the Mediterranean on its way back to Cairo from Paris," the office of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said in a statement, according to CNN. The Airbus A320, which took off from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris bound for Cairo International Airport, had 56 passengers and 10 crew members on board when it vanished from radar around 2:45 a.m. Cairo time. The plane went down about 175 miles from Egypt's coastline after making a sudden 90-degree turn to the left and then doing a full, 360-degree spin to the right, according to Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos.
There were reports Thursday that debris from the flight had been recovered near the Greek island of Karpathos, but Greek officials later announced that "an assessment of the finds showed that they do not belong to an aircraft." Egyptian officials said three French and three British investigators and an Airbus expert arrived in Cairo to help investigate the crash, the Associated Press reported. Commander Marius Tzannis, the deputy spokesman of the Hellenic National Defense General Staff, told CNN that a Greek frigate was pulled out of the search Friday. He said that Greece still has a military plane in area and others on standby on the islands of Crete and Karpathos. Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathi said the possibility of a terror attack as the cause of the crash of flight MS804 is "higher than that of a technical error,” Egypt's state-run newspaper Al-Ahram reported.
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