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World|opinion & analysis|November 9, 2015 / 05:07 PM
IS may have given orders to down Russian plane, analyst says

AKIPRESS.COM - russia-plane-crash An Australian security analyst believes Islamist extremists in Egypt would have been acting on instructions from Islamic State leaders in Syria, and not off their own bat, if they were in fact responsible for downing a Russian passenger plane in the Sinai late last month, ABC cites.

Aviation investigators appear increasingly certain it was a bomb that brought down the airbus A321 last Saturday week, killing 224 people.

British authorities are taking seriously the claims by local Islamic State militants that they were responsible for the crash.

Islamic State's Egyptian affiliate – known as Sinai Province, or Wilayat Sinai – issued an audio message last week claiming responsibility for the crash and pledging to reveal in its own time how it did so.

It said it had shot the airbus down in response to Russian air strikes that killed hundreds of Muslims in Syria.

Associate Professor Rodger Shanahan from the Australian National Institute and the Lowy Institute in Sydney, believes the Sinai-based group would have been acting on instructions from Islamic State in Syria, and would not have launched such an attack on its own.

"With Russia intervening in Syria they (Russia) had obviously become a target," he said. "Wilayat Sinai have been targeting Egyptian security forces, Egyptian judicial figures, the Egyptian government... They haven't been focused on foreign entities... there is no reason for them necessarily to target [a Russian plane]."

Wilayat Sinai is considered the most powerful and dangerous of several Islamist groups that have sprung up in the Sinai region in recent years.

Associate Professor Shanahan said the ousting of former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi and the rise of an autocratic military regime in Egypt has seen extremist groups expand in recent years, especially in the Sinai where impoverished Bedouins and other marginalised groups have morphed into more extremist groups, bound by a common disaffection with the government.

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