ISIS claims downing airliner is reprisal for air strikes; Jihadist 'used brains more than explosives'

ISIS claims downing Russian airliner in Sinai in reprisal for Moscow’s Syria air strikes

….The Sinai branch of the Islamic State has developed a highly competent intelligence-gathering network, debkafile’s sources report, operated by local Bedouin tribesmen who track the slightest movements in the Peninsula. The Egyptian army and the American troops serving at the big the Multinational Force base there are fully aware of the round-the-clock surveillance maintained by the terrorists at Egyptian resorts, using staff at hotels, restaurants and the local airfield as inside informers.
Ansar has never yet harmed the tourist traffic in Sinai. But once ISIS decided to use it to hit back at Russia’s intensified military intervention in the Syrian conflict, the Islamists would not have found it hard to find out when the Russian airliner was due to take off from the Red Sea resort, chart its route north along the western coast of the Gulf of Aqaba up to Dahab and then turn west towards central Sinai and head for the Mediterranean. All the terrorists had to do was to lay a missile ambush for the plane from the Jabal Halal eminence of 876 meters (2,865 ft).

Had the crash been the result of a technical fault, as Moscow and Cairo claim, it would not have been so completely gutted but broken up into large fragments. The total destruction could only have been caused by an explosion either inside the A321 or a direct missile hit.

RT correspondent reaches crash site of doomed Airbus A321 airliner

ISIS claims: We downed Russian airliner in ‘sophisticated attack’