'We brought down that plane'
2004-01-05 15:02
Cairo - A man claiming to represent an Islamist group in Yemen said on Monday the Egyptian charter plane that crashed at the weekend was brought down in an "attack" by his group, in an anonymous telephone call to AFP.
It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the claim by the caller who spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent.
The man, who said he was an Egyptian calling from Cairo, said he represented a group called Ansar el-Haq, the Apostles of Truth, which he said carried out an attack that brought down the plane.
Ansar el-Haq is based in Yemen, he said, although nothing is known of the group.
A Boeing 737 operated by a Cairo-based charter firm, Flash Airways, plunged into the Red Sea on Saturday shortly after taking off from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 148 people aboard, mainly French holidaymakers.
Egypt has ruled out terrorism as a cause of the crash and pointed to an unspecified technical fault. While French officials declined to rule out any cause, they said it appeared to have been a classic accident on take-off.
The caller also warned that his group would stage an attack "soon" against Air France "if France does not go back on its decision to ban the Islamic headscarf" in state schools.
Yemen is a stronghold of the Islamic militant group Al-Qaeda, headed by fugitive Osama bin Laden.