An EgyptAir flight carrying 66 people and traveling from Paris to Cairo vanished from radar on Thursday, the airline announced, and the aircraft was later determined to have crashed.
EgyptAir first disclosed on social media that the A320 aircraft lost contact with radar while flying above the Mediterranean Sea. The plane was flying at 37,000 feet when it lost contact with radar overnight, CNN first reported.
Fifty-six passengers and 10 crew members were aboard flight 804 when it vanished, the airline said.
Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sharif Fathi, who at first classified the plane as missing, would not deny the possibility of terrorism during a press conference in Cairo. He later said that the crash was more likely to have been caused by an act of terrorism than technical issues.
"On the contrary ... if you thoroughly analyze the situation, the possibility of having a different action or a terror attack, is higher than the possibility of having a technical failure," Fathi told reporters when asked whether a technical problem caused the crash, the Associated Press reported.
Egyptian and Greek officials said that the aircraft crashed early Thursday morning into the Mediterranean Sea off of the coast of Crete, a Greek island. Later, conflicting reports emerged about whether or not debris from the plane had been found.
French President Francois Hollande also said the plane crashed at sea.
"The information that we have been able to gather—the prime minister, the members of the government, and, of course, the Egyptian authorities—unfortunately, confirm for us that this plane crashed at sea and has been lost," Hollande said, according to the New York Times.
He indicated that nothing had been ruled out as a cause for the incident.
"When we have the truth, we must draw all the conclusions, whether it is an accident or another hypothesis, which everybody has in mind: the terrorist hypothesis," Hollande stated.
Greece’s defense minister said that the airplane "swerved and then plunged" and descended toward the Mediterranean Sea.
The airline confirmed on Twitter that 15 of the passengers were French, 30 Egyptian, one British, one Belgian, two Iraqi, one Kuwaiti, one Saudi, one Canadian, one Portuguese, one Algerian, one Chadian, and one Sudanese.
EgyptAir’s crisis center was following up with authorities, and the airline was also hosting family members of the missing passengers close to Cairo Airport, the airline said.
This post will be updated as further information becomes available.