The report by the Associated Press news agency follows days of conflicting claims as investigators try to discover why the jet, which was meant to land in Cairo, crashed in the Mediterranean on May 19.

The foreign official was quoted in Tuesday’s report as saying that all 80 pieces of body parts brought to Cairo so far are small and that “there isn’t even a whole body part, like an arm or a head”.

A day earlier, the head of Egypt’s state-run provider of air navigation services said that flight 804 did not swerve or lose altitude before it disappeared off radar, challenging an earlier account by Greece’s defence minister.