Senior EgyptAir officials met with the French relatives of some of those killed in an EgyptAir plane crash on Thursday, Egypt's civil aviation said on Saturday.
EgyptAir Chariman Safwat Moslem and his vice Ahmed Adel met with the families, who flew to Egypt on Saturday, at a hotel near Cairo's international airport. With the help of an unnamed foreign expert, the civil aviation ministry said that the relatives were briefed on the process of recovering the human remains from the plane.
The Egyptian military reported that it located debris, personal belongings, plane seats and human remains in the Mediterranean on Friday, near the spot where the plane disappeared from radar.
EgyptAir said the relatives were told that the process of retrieval may take a long time, and that DNA tests could be necessary for identification, which would also take weeks.
The fifteen French nationals who lost relatives in the EgyptAir plane crash arrived in Cairo early on Saturday, MENA state agency reported.
All 66 people on board flight MS804 are assumed to have died, including the 15 French passengers, when the plane was lost over the Mediterranean sea.
The French victims' families were received by a number of French embassy officials and were escorted to a hotel designated by the Egyptian Ministry of Civil Aviation for their stay as they await news of the fate of their loved ones.
Cairo airport police and customs officials expedited the group's arrival procedures.
On Friday, three French officials and an Airbus technical expert arrived in Cairo to participate in an investigation led by Egyptian authorities.
Some of the families who arrived on Thursday in Cairo returned home late Friday after they met with EgyptAir officials who updated them on the latest information.
Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and his French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault exchanged condolences on Thursday.
EgyptAir on Saturday changed the name of its Paris-Cairo flight route from MS804 to MS802, Al-Ahram Arabic website reported.
