Terror call 'unfounded'
2004-01-06 10:14
Lisbon - French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said Monday that a claim that an unknown Islamist group brought down a Paris-bound charter plane which crashed into the Red Sea over the weekend appeared "unfounded".
"There is nothing to corroborate such a claim, this claim is apparently unfounded," he told reporters following talks in Lisbon with his Portuguese counterpart Teresa Gouveia.
"There is no indication, no material element which can in any way give credit to this theory," he added.
A man claiming to represent an Islamist group in Yemen said the plane was was brought down in an "attack" by his group called Ansar el-Haq, the Apostles of Truth, in an anonymous telephone call to AFP in Cairo.
Yemeni authorities denied the existence of the group on their soil.
A total of 148 people aboard the Flash Air Boeing 737, most of them French tourists returning home from a New Year's holiday, died in the crash which occurred minutes after it took off from the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday.
Egyptian investigators said it may have been caused by some unspecified technical failure.