Search Continues For Crash Victims

French and Egyptians laid wreaths Sunday in an area of the Red Sea where a jet went down, killing all 148 people aboard. Questions were raised about the charter airline's safety standards, with Swiss authorities saying they banned the airline 14 months ago after it flunked an inspection and an Italian passenger recalling a flight when an engine burst into flames.

Search crews on military and civilian vessels resumed their efforts to recover bodies, the flight data recorder and the fuselage of the plane, believed resting in 2,600 feet of water. But the extreme depth was hampering those efforts, and only small pieces of wreckage and body parts from the shark-infested waters near the resort have been found.

France joined the recovery effort by dispatching three aircraft with 50 experts, a military surveillance plane, a naval frigate, 16 scuba divers and a robot submarine. Of the 148 passengers who perished, there were 133 French tourists, a Japanese, a Moroccan and 13 Egyptian crew members.

French Deputy Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier told reporters there was nothing to suggest that terrorism was the cause of Saturday's crash of Flash Airlines Flight FSH604, which had just taken off from Sharm el-Sheik on its way to Paris when it crashed.

"We should not be talking at all about terrorism," Muselier said. "It appears to have been an accident."

Egyptian officials have said preliminary information indicates the crash was apparently caused by a mechanical problem. Radar images showed the plane turned left as normal after takeoff, straightened out and then turned right before plunging into the sea.

Several tourists and witnesses interviewed by The Associated Press said they did not hear any explosions and their windows did not shatter or rattle at the time of the crash.

Egypt has said the Flash Airlines jet, an 11-year-old Boeing 737, had checked out fine before the flight. But Swiss officials said Sunday that technical problems forced them to ban the Egyptian company's planes from landing in Switzerland.

"A series of safety shortcomings showed up in a plane of Flash Airlines during a routine security check at Zurich Airport in October 2002," Celestine Perissinotto, a spokeswoman for the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Aviation, told AP.

Egyptian Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafeeq called the charge "baseless."

"If they have any proof, they have to submit it," he told reporters.

Perissinotto said the Swiss report had been given to Egyptian civil aviation authorities. "Since then we have had no reaction," Perissinotto said.

Flash Airlines' chief pilot Hassan Mounir denied the Swiss ban stemmed from safety concerns, telling the AP in Cairo "it was a financial problem."

But Mounir confirmed Italian press reports that a Flash plane caught fire while flying over Greece the same month as the Zurich airport inspection. Italian tourists recalled seeing flames coming out of the starboard engine on a flight from Sharm el-Sheik to Bologna, Italy, on Oct. 27, 2002. The plane landed at Athens airport with fire engines alongside the runway.

"To say that the plane was decrepit would be a compliment," passenger Eugenio Gedda told Italian state television Sunday.

"It's normal," Mounir said. "You can have an engine fire in flight."

Mounir could not say if the fire occurred on the same plane that crashed Saturday. Flash Airlines, which has been in business six years, operated two Boeing 737s.

Asked whether the fire and Zurich inspection raised questions about the standard of maintenance at Flash Airlines, Mounir replied: "No, our planes are very well maintained."

Flash Airlines' remaining plane, also an 11-year-old Boeing 737, flew tourists from France to Cairo Sunday, according to airport officials. It was not clear how many passengers were on board.

Muselier told reporters in Sharm el-Sheik that about 60 percent of the passengers from the crashed plane had been picked up, but that the remains were so badly mangled that it would be difficult to identify them.

"We were able to see the bags full of body parts," Muselier said, choking back tears after visiting a hospital morgue. "It was terrible to see."

In a solemn, brief ceremony out at sea, the dead were bid a final farewell. French, Egyptian and Japanese officials led a convoy of three tourist ferries filled with journalists to the site where the plane went down.

There, they held three bouquets, wrapped at the stem with the French, Egyptian and Japanese flags, upside down and let them slip into the water, as helicopters flew overhead.

From the shore, vacationers strained to watch the ceremony, taking breaks from volleyball, paddle boats and swimming.

"It's difficult to see the helicopters and boats," said Stavros Pawagiotouros, 47, from Athens, sitting in a bathing suit under a parasol watching the boats.

While many tourists went about vacation as usual, others said they felt queazy about swimming in the waters when the bodies have not been retrieved.

"I thought twice before going swimming," said Pawagiotouros.

One Italian tourist who went swimming said she feared the waves were washing in traces of the crash.

"We found this," said Maria Theresa Brignani, 24, holding a bright yellow canvas strap. "This might have come from the plane."

Carl Clemmensen, a 50-year-old Norwegian said while playing bocce ball: "It's not a nice feeling lying here in the sun and knowing that so many people died right there. But life has to go on. That's the reality of life."