Wreckage of crashed EgyptAir plane found at sea near Alexandria

The Egyptian Armed Forces said in a statement on Friday it had found parts of debris from the missing EgyptAir plane 290 kilometers north of the coastal city of Alexandria.

"The Egyptian aircraft and navy vessels have found some personal belongings of passengers and parts of the wreckage," Mohamed Samir, spokesman for the army, said in a statement on his Facebook page.

Working on combing the sea and recovering the wreckage are still underway, the statement added.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has extended his condolences to all victims from Egypt and other countries in a statement.

He ordered to continue investigations to uncover the reasons behind the accident.

Meanwhile, three investigators and a technical expert from France's air accident authority and Airbus have arrived in Egypt early Friday morning to help investigate the EgyptAir plane's disappearance on Thursday, state-run Ahram website reported.

France will join an Egypt-led investigative committee as it is the country that manufactured the plane.

Sisi ordered on Thursday the civil aviation ministry, the army' s search and rescue centre, the navy and the air force to take all necessary measures to locate debris from the aircraft.

In a statement issued by his office on Thursday, Sisi also ordered an investigative committee formed by the civil aviation ministry to immediately start investigating the causes of the plane's disappearance.

Egyptian civil aviation ministry said Egypt, Greece and France were all involved in the search for the plane.

The Airbus A320, en route from Paris to Cairo, disappeared from radar screens on Thursday at 2:45 am Cairo local time (0045 GMT) with 66 people aboard, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French.

The country's aviation minister said in a press conference on Thursday that possibilities of a terrorist attack are more likely behind the crash than a technical failure.

(APD)