CAIRO: The U.S. embassy in Cairo has ordered that all of its staff refrain from traveling to the Sinai peninsula pending the results of a plane that crashed Saturday morning, it announced Monday on its website.
A total of 224 passengers and crew were killed after a Russian plane crashed; the flight went off the radar 23 minutes after take-off from Sharm el-Sheikh.
Early claims that the Islamic State group-affiliated militants were responsible for the crash were dismissed by Cairo, which said the flight would have been too high to be targeted by a weapon.
An international team of experts have come to Sinai to examine the crash site.