Technical Failure ?

In what must be the most amazing bit of detective work since Inspector Morse was shifted to traffic duties, French and Egyptian officials have diagnosed the Red Sea 737 crash as a 'technical failure', despite

No black box recovery
No other telemetric data from the plane
No distress messages

In fact the only available information was that the plane took off, gained hight normally, then suddenly fell into the Red Sea.

The plane had taken off from Sharm el-Sheikh, where by chance Tony Blair is on holiday.

Now it may be that this is all a tragic coincidence. (The American Airlines crash two months after 9/11 appears not to have been terrorist-related, though interestingly a final report is still awaited more then two years later.)

But I can't see that the official Egyptian and French responses are anything more than wishful thinking, unless they know more than they're telling us.

UPDATE - AP have reported that the plane was trying to return to the airport when it crashed, which would explain how it hit the Red Sea (its route to Cairo was nearly all over land).

UPDATE2 - an obscure Islamic group has claimed responsibility. Link via Jerusalem Posts. TASS has other bits of news on the tragedy.