US President Barack Obama said on Thursday there was a "possibility" that the crash of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt was caused by a bomb on board the airliner.
"I think there's a possibility that there was a bomb on board. And we're taking that very seriously," Obama said in an interview with KIRO/CBS News Radio that was quoted on CNN. "We're going to spend a lot of time just making sure our own investigators and own intelligence community find out what's going on before we make any definitive pronouncements. But it's certainly possible that there was a bomb on board," he said.
In an earlier report, British Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday also said that "a bomb brought down" the airliner with the loss of 224 lives.In a telephone call, Putin told Cameron it was important that assessments of the cause of the crash be based on information from the official investigation, Interfax news agency reported. Cameron, who hosted Egypt's President Abdul Fatah al-Sisi on Thursday for a previously scheduled visit, said: "We cannot be certain that the Russian airliner was brought down by a terrorist bomb, but it looks increasingly likely that that was the case."
However, Egypt's civil aviation minister rejected claims by Britain and the United States that the Russian airliner may have been brought down by a bomb.
Read: No possible cause for plane crash in Egypt should be ruled out, states Kremlin
