CAIRO, May 22 (Aswat Masriya) – An Egypt-led investigation committee will release a preliminary report on Thursday’s crash of EgyptAir’s Cairo-Paris flight MS804 in one month, state-run newspaper Al-Ahram reported on Sunday. 

Ayman al-Moqadem, the head of Egypt's Air Accidents Investigation department, was quoted in Ahram as saying that the report will present all data gathered by the date of its publication. 

Egypt’s flag-carrier airline had announced early Thursday morning that its flight MS804 vanished off the radar 16 km (10 miles) into Egyptian airspace as it was crossing the Mediterranean at 2:45 AM Cairo time en route from Paris to Cairo.    

The 12-year-old Airbus A320-232 airliner had 56 passengers on board – 30 Egyptians, 15 French nationals, two Iraqi nationals, a British national, a Saudi national, a Portuguese national, a Belgian, a Kuwaiti, a Chadian, an Algerian, and a Canadian. It also had a 10-member crew on board.  

France, where the plane was manufactured, is taking part in the investigation because it is the country with the second largest number of passengers on board the flight. Three French investigators and a technical expert from Airbus arrived in Cairo Friday morning to join the investigation. 

A team representing the investigation committee has started accompanying the Egyptian military’s naval forces in the search for the plane’s wreckage, Moqadem said. 

The Egyptian military said in statements on Friday that its naval forces discovered debris, personal belongings of passengers, luggage, aircraft seats, and body parts in the Mediterranean Sea, 290 km north of Egypt’s coastal city of Alexandria.  

Cause still unknown

The cause of the crash is still known. Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said on Thursday that he does not rule out terrorism or any other factor, but no militant group has claimed responsibility for the crash as yet. 

Moqadem refused to comment on reports about warnings purportedly sent from the plane about smoke detected on board. The French air accident investigation agency BEA had said on Saturday that the EgyptAir flight has sent signals that smoke was detected on the plane before it disappeared.

The plane’s black boxes, pieces of equipment that record details about a flight and help pinpoint the cause of a crash, are yet to be retrieved.