A US diplomatic source is reported to have said that Israeli intelligence prompted Britain to cancel all flights to and from the Sinai Peninsula last week.

Israeli officials declined to comment on the report by CNN.

Last week, a well-connected source told the JC that Britain did not have special intelligence capabilities in the Sinai, where a Russian passenger jet crashed eight days ago, killing all 224 people on board.

Only Israel and the US could have supplied the kind of solid information that would have persuaded the British government that passenger jets flying between the UK and Sinai were in imminent danger of terrorist attack, the source said.