The Egyptian military says it has found parts of debris from the missing EgyptAir plane 290kms north of the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria.

The navy has also found some of the passengers’ belongings and is sweeping the area looking for the plane’s black box, the military said in a statement.

Egypt has been leading international efforts to find wreckage of the plane, backed by France, Greece and Turkey. The US navy dispatched a P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft from a base in Sicily.

The aircraft was carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew, from Paris to Cairo when it came down on Thursday morning.

EgyptAir claimed on Thursday that it had found part of the wreckage and life jackets belonging to MS804 near the island of Karpathos, east of Crete, but the airline’s vice-president, Ahmed Adel, later said: “We stand corrected”.

(The Guardian)