A Russian airliner carrying more than 200 passengers and crew has crashed into Sinai, the Egyptian Prime Minister has confirmed.
Airbus A-321 was reported missing 23 minutes after taking off from the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh early on Saturday morning, according to Russian news channel, RT.
A statement from the office of the Egyptian Prime Minister, Sharif Ismail's office said the plane is believed to have crashed into the mountainous region of Sinai.
217 passengers, thought to be mostly Russian tourists, and seven crew members were on board.
Video Screen Record: Missing #7K9268 descended 5,000 feet before losing radar contact from Flight Radar
There were initially conflicting reports about the fate of the plane, after it was thought to have made contact with Turkish air traffic control, but failed to make contact with Cyprus.
"Preliminary reports suggest that the Airbus 320, Kogalymavia flight 92-68 from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg, set off at 6:51 Moscow time (4:51GMT) and failed to make contact with Larnaka air traffic control in Cyprus at 7:14, when the plane was last seen on radar. There were 212 passengers and seven crew on board," Sergey Izvolskiy, a spokesperson for Turkey's air traffic control agency TASS told RT.
But following the Egyptian Prime Minister's statement, local media reporting wreckage and more than 20 ambulances at the scene, further confirmed the crash, the BBC said.
Flight #7K9268 was descending with about 6000 feet per minute just before signal was lost https://t.co/RlcJTpDHwI
Egyptian Prime Minister Sharif Ismail has formed a committee to deal with the crash.
Security officials in Egypt have said that the airliner is completely destroyed, according to local media, and it is not expected that any of the passengers on board will have survived the crash.
It is thought that 17 of the 217 passengers on board were children.