Relatives of passengers of Russian Airbus-321 aircraft react at Pulkovo international airport in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on October 31, 2015. [Photo/IC]

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.