Cairo, May 19 (EFE).– An EgyptAir passenger jet that left Paris bound for Cairo with 66 people on board crashed into the Mediterranean Sea early Thursday for unknown reasons, although authorities are not ruling out a terrorist attack and say that hypothesis is more likely than technical failure.

The Airbus A320 disappeared from radar screens at 2:45 a.m. Egypt time (0045 GMT), shortly after entering that North African nation’s airspace, and went down at a spot around 280 kilometers (175 miles) from the Egyptian coast, where rescue operations began shortly afterward and were continuing.

Rescue personnel found pieces of plastic some 50 miles southeast of the Greek island of Karpathos that are believed to belong to Flight 804, Greek and Egyptian authorities said.

In a statement, EgyptAir said Greek authorities had found “floating material” believed to be debris and life jackets from the jet.

Although the causes remain unclear, Egyptian and French authorities, who are assisting with the investigation, are not ruling out any possibility, including the terrorism hypothesis.

Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sharif Fathi said at a press conference in Cairo that there was a greater chance that the crash was due to a terrorist attack than a technical flaw, but he stressed that it was too early to draw any conclusions.

Earlier, French President Francois Hollande also refused to rule out any hypothesis, including the possibility of a terror attack.

For his part, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the KGB’s successor, said Thursday that everything points to a terrorist attack being the cause of the crash. EFE