Debris and items belonging to passengers have been recovered by Egyptian Navy, in the search for EgyptAir flight MS804.

EgyptAir flight MS804 was forced to make three emergency landings in the 24 hours before it crashed, according to reports in French media.

On three occasions the Airbus A320 was forced to turn around after taking off and return to its originating airport - Asmara in Eritrea, Cairo, and Tunis - after its warning systems signalled anomalies on board.

Each time it returned, it was quickly allowed to leave again after inspectors carried out a technical audit and found nothing amiss, the reports said.

An EgyptAir A320, similar to the one that crash in the Mediterranean Sea.

All 66 passengers and crew died after the plane disappeared off radar screens and crashed in the early hours of May 19 while en route from Paris, France to Cairo, Egypt.

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REUTERS Some items recovered from the crashed EgyptAir plane.

EgyptAir's chairman denied the claims on Thursday [local time].

"For me, it is not true," Safwat Musallam said on the sidelines of the International Air Transport Association annual meeting in Dublin. He said flight MS804 had not experienced any maintenance issues before departure and that the plane was "normal".

"We fully trust the aircraft and the pilot," Musallam said.

France's transport minister Alain Vidalies said he could not confirm the reports, which said the plane had sent signals indicating smoke via the automatic Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System on the three earlier flights.

"We have a sudden event which could point towards an attack. On the other hand we have other information which points more towards an accident," Vidalies told France Info radio.

The reports came as search teams narrowed the search radius for the wreckage from 4.8km to 1.9km.

On Wednesday, French investigators said they had detected a signal from one of the plane's black boxes. The discovery raises hopes that the data and cockpit voice recorders can soon be retrieved and could give insight into what caused the crash.

However, it will be at least a week before a specialist vessel will arrive carrying robots able to dive to the 2.9km depth where the wreckage is believed to be, around 290km north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

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