notoriety, to create fear and terror. i was also told that isis capability to target aircraft or to attack a sophisticated airport is still not considered as high as al qaeda s but isis is incredibly ambitious. it would attack an aircraft, a cruise ship. the group has promised to make 9/11 look like a sideshow. so i think it will look for any kind of opportunity, aircraft or beyond aircraft. richard, if we do if the train of events and the train of sort of noise from the uk government and the u.s. government, these assurances, even if they re so far anonymous assurances it is starting the look like a bomb, if they get closer to concluding that isis was behind this and planted a bomb on the aircraft, do you expect anything in terms of a response either from russia or
direction? is this a surprise? have we seen isis look toward aircraft in the past to get the terroristic message across? reporter: well, airports and aircraft have always been tar gets for terrorists, even go back to the attacks in the 70s and 80s by palestinian groups. they have been something that militant groups have tried to target in order to gain notoriety, to create fear and terror. i was also told that isis capability to target aircraft or to attack a sophisticated airport is still not considered as high as al qaeda s but isis is incredibly ambitious. it would attack an aircraft, a cruise ship. the group has promised to make 9/11 look like a sideshow. so i think it will look for any kind of opportunity, aircraft or beyond aircraft. richard, if we do if the
if you think, for example, about the garland, texas, attack is immediately afterwards to be very specific about what they did, charts and graphs, circles and arrows, pictures of people involved and they haven t done that here so, you know, all of which is to say it s very suggestive. there are some things in intelligence that they re not telling us. we have a sense of what some of it is and we can t report it. but all of those things together, rachel, the physical stuff and the intelligence lead them in a direction but don t get them to the conclusion. clearly we have in terms of thinking about isis or a group like them, we obviously have motive. the question is whether they have means and i think that brings us pretty specifically to the question of whether or not we understand enough about the security of the airport from which this aircraft took off and any security concerns around this airline specifically. is sharm el sheikh considered to be a dangerous place in terms of
sharm el sheikh. it was one big coordinated bombing attack ten years ago that did hit the resort town itself. did hit sharm el sheikh exactly. targeted or theist areas. remote detonated bombs. 88 people killed and nearly a dozen british tourists. that was ten years, 2005. this time last year, one relatively high profile group of militants in the sinai pledged allegiance to isis and calling themselves the sinai province of isis. that was about a year ago. and when that specific group immediately claimed responsibility when we learned that that russian plane had crashed in the sinai on saturday, most people blew it off. most people blew it off as bluster and wishful thinking. it was perceived as the group wanting credit to do with something they could not do with.
news chief foreign correspondent to talk about the new news and new intelligence on the plane crash. richard, of course, covering isis for years. thank you so much for hanging with us. sorry about the delay. it s not a problem at all. can you hear me? i can hear you! god willing. thank you. reporter: the science works. the magic of television. let me ask you, richard, about, obviously, the bottom line here again is we do not know if i sis is just bragging. taking credit for something that they couldn t conceivably have done or didn t do in this instance when they say they brought down this plane. if they did bring down this plane, if they did get a bomb on this plane, for example, somehow, is this a big expansion about what we know about their capabilities particularly in that part of the sfwhorld. reporter: it depends, really. isis has enormous capabilities in iraq and syria. the group operates tanks, it