CAIRO—An EgyptAir flight from Paris with 66 people on board vanished from radar screens on Thursday with a Greek aviation source saying it had crashed into the Mediterranean between the Greek islands and the Egyptian coast.
There were no immediate reports of the discovery of any debris but both Egypt and Greece said they had dispatched aircraft and naval vessels to the area on a search-and-rescue mission.
Twenty-six foreigners were among the 56 passengers, including 15 French citizens, a Briton and a Canadian, EgyptAir said.
France called a crisis meeting of top ministers as Prime Minister Manuel Valls said “no theory can be ruled out” to explain the plane’s disappearance.
The Islamic State jihadist group has been waging a deadly insurgency against Egyptian security forces and last October claimed the bombing of a Russian airliner flying home holidaymakers from the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, which killed all 224 people on board.
EgyptAir said contact was lost with the flight about 280 kilometers north of the Egyptian coast.
The Greek aviation source said the flight had disappeared from Greek radar at around 0029 GMT.
“It crashed around 130 nautical miles off the island of Karpathos,” the source told AFP, referring to an island northeast of Crete.
The official said the last communication with the pilot was three minutes before the plane disappeared, and that there had been no distress call.
EgyptAir Holding Company vice president Ahmed Adel also said there had been “no distress call” before it vanished.
EgyptAir had said military search and rescue had detected a “distress message,” but the army denied detecting any such message.
A tweet on the airline’s official account said Flight MS804 left Paris at 11:09 pm (2109 GMT), “heading to Cairo [and] has disappeared from radar”.
Further tweets in Arabic said contact was lost at 2:45 am Cairo time (0045 GMT), when the plane was just inside Egyptian airspace and at an altitude of 37,000 feet.