Update: No emergency evacuation for Russian tourists in Sharm

Russian holidaymakers have been told they can choose whether or not they want to be evacuated from Sharm el-Sheikh or fly home as originally scheduled, a Russian tourism representative told AFP Saturday.

Eighty thousand Russian tourists are currently on holiday in Egypt, a spokesperson for the Russian Union of the Tourism Industry, Irina Tyurina, reported following a decision by the Russian government to halt flights to Egypt after a Russian plane crashed in Sinai last week claiming 224 lives.

"Tourists will be returning from Egypt to Russia when they planned to," said Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, who is in a charge of a task force established to oversee the return of tourists, AFP reported.

"Most people left for two weeks — our usual holiday tour lasts two weeks — therefore they will return in about two weeks," he said in televised comments late Friday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin initially grounded all Russian flights to Egypt on the advice of his security chief, a Kremlin spokesperson told the Interfax news agency Friday.

Putin’s security bureau advised halting flights until investigations are concluded into last Saturday’s deadly crash.

The move represented a marked shift the Kremlin's tone. For the past week, Russian officials have said repeatedly that the cause of the crash remained unknown and the media shouldn’t jump to conclusions amid rampant speculations that the plane was brought down by a bomb.

Putin called Prime Minister David Cameron after he told media Thursday that an explosive device was the most likely cause of the disaster, Reuters reported. Putin warned his UK counterpart that it was important to refrain from hypothesizing until the results of the official investigation were released.

On Thursday Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov had said that Russian flights would continue to fly to and from Sharm el-Sheikh. "Theories about what happened and the causes of the incident can only be pronounced by the investigation," he said earlier on Friday.

The bomb hypothesis is gaining more and more credence. US President Barack Obama stated on Thursday night that "there is a possibility" that a bomb was on the Russian flight during a radio interview.

"We are going to spend a lot of time making sure our own investigators and our own intelligence community figures out exactly what’s going on before we make any definitive pronouncements,” Obama said. “But it is certainly possible that there was a bomb on board.”

Russia is the latest in a handful of European countries refusing to allow flights to Sharm el-Sheikh, though most have not changed their flights to Egypt's capital. Britain was the first, ordering its airlines to ground its planes to Sharm on Wednesday evening due to security concerns. Egyptian authorities have persisted in refuting claims that an explosive device contributed to the crash, and criticized the UK for acting unilaterally in the matter and not waiting for the results of the Egyptian investigation.

Some UK airlines resumed flights on Friday just to help evacuate the estimated 20,000 British tourists stranded in the resort town. About 4,000 people were trying to get on rescue flights out of the airport on Friday.

After reporting Friday morning that Egyptian authorities were refusing to allow its rescue flights to operate, in the early afternoon EasyJet said two of its planes were finally en route back to the UK. Its other flights would not operate Friday, however, as Egyptian officials are restricting the number of flights from Sharm to the UK, the company said.

Other UK airlines like British Airways and Monarch, who were also resuming flights Friday to help bring the stranded tourists home, were not confronted by the same scheduling problems as EasyJet.

"Our flights are currently on the way to Sharm,” Monarch tweeted Friday. “We expect all our aircraft to depart as planned later today." 

While speaking in Sharm el-Sheikh Friday morning, British ambassador John Casson had denied that Egyptian authorities were blocking the arrival of UK planes, BBC news correspondent in Cairo Orla Guerin tweeted.

But later on Friday Egypt's Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamal confirmed to Reuters that officials had turned the EasyJet flights away. He said the airline had scheduled far more flights than the airport could handle, and officials were working with the company to reduce them.

EasyJet requested that passengers book accommodation for an additional two days in Sharm. The airline said it would reimburse the cost of accommodation and "reasonable expenses." 

The UK also sent its own security personnel to the Sharm el-Sheikh airport on Wednesday, in a move that some commentators called unprecedented in its lack of trust in another government's ability to handle security. 

As an additional security measure, passengers taking UK flights out of Sharm on Friday would only be permitted to carry hand luggage, the Reuters-affiliated news site Aswat Masreya reported, while hold luggage would be transported separately.

The luggage ban was also adopted by the Dutch airline KLM, which released a statement on Friday saying that passengers on that day’s Cairo-Amsterdam flight would only be able to carry hand luggage, due to "national and international information and out of precaution."