Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said on Saturday no "irregular" activities were believed to be behind a Russian Airbus-321 plane that crashed in Egypt's Sinai earlier on Saturday.
"The black box is what will determine the reason for the plane crash," Ismail added.
A claim by a group allied to the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Sinai that it brought down the plane has been dismissed by both Russia and Egypt.
"Experts asserted that a plane flying that high technically cannot be shot down," the Egyptian prime minister answered one of the reporters, stressing there was nothing "irregular" behind the accident.
There have been media reports that the group loyal to the IS, have acquired Russian shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles.
But these types of missiles can only be effective against low-flying aircraft or helicopters.
The Russian airliner was cruising at 31,000 feet when it lost contact with air traffic controllers, according to Egyptian aviation officials.
Bodies, black boxes retrieved
Egypt has already found and obtained both black boxes from the crashed Russian passenger plane, the civil aviation minister told a news conference.
There are normally two black boxes on an aircraft, one for cockpit voice recordings and one for flight data. Egyptian authorities had earlier said they only found one.
Of the 224 passengers and crew members on board, 129 bodies have been picked up.
The plane crashed in North Sinai province and all its passengers, mostly Russians, died in the tragic accident.
Ismail told reporters that around 50 ambulances hurried to the scene and that the dead bodies are currently being transferred to Zeinhom Morgue in the capital Cairo.
The aviation ministry said the wreckage was found in Hassana, a mountainous area 35 km south of Arish city.
Bereaved relatives in tears
Friends and relatives of the crash victims were gathering Saturday at a hotel near St. Petersburg's Pulkovo airport.
Psychologists were meeting with them in a large conference room off the lobby and police kept journalists away. Some left the room occasionally, looking drawn with tear-stained faces.
Yulia Zaitseva was one of them. She said her friends, newlyweds Elena Rodina and Alexander Krotov, were on the flight. Both were 33. Zaitseva said Rodina, her friend for 20 years, "really wanted to go to Egypt, though I told her, 'Why the hell do you want to go to Egypt?'''
"She was a very good friend who was ready to give everything to other people. To lose such a friend is like having your hand cut off,'' Zaitseva said, adding that Rodina's parents feel "like their lives are over.''
According to Russian news agencies, the flight was chartered by the St. Petersburg-based Brisco tour company. The plane was made in 1997 and has since 2012 been operated by Metrojet.
Officers from Russia's top investigative body raided the offices of Metrojet and Brisco on Saturday, searching the premises and questioning employees. Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said agents also took samples of fuel from the airport in the Russian city of Samara where the plane stopped Friday before heading to Sharm el-Sheikh, where it had overnighted.
Impacts on tourism in Egypt
Roughly three million Russian tourists, or nearly a third of all visitors in 2014, come to Egypt every year, mostly to Red Sea resorts in Sinai or in mainland Egypt.
"It is too premature to detect the impact this will have on tourism. We need to know what happened first,'' Tourism Ministry spokeswoman Rasha Azazi told The Associated Press.
There was no sign of anything unusual at Sharm el-Sheikh's airport just hours after news of the disaster broke. Hundreds of holidaymakers, mostly from Europe and the Middle East, were arriving and departing. Flights in the afternoon were leaving at the rate of four to five per hour, with lines for international check-in spilling out the main gates.
Pavel Moroz, a 30-year-old engineer from Moscow, arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday afternoon on a Metrojet flight. He plans to stay for a week to take a scuba diving course.
"We heard the news a few hours before leaving and thought for a bit about canceling our trip, but then decided to go anyway and everything was fine,'' he said as he left the airport.
