Body parts recovered from the crash site of EgyptAir Flight MS804 suggest there was an explosion aboard the aircraft, according to a senior Egyptian forensic official.

Body parts recovered from the crash site of EgyptAir Flight MS804 suggest there was an explosion aboard the aircraft, according to a senior Egyptian forensic official.

The human remains are in small pieces, suggesting that an explosion ripped through the A320 aircraft and the 66 passengers and crew onboard, the official the Associated Press.

"There isn't even a whole body part, like an arm or a head," the official said. "The logical explanation is that an explosion brought it down."

But Egypt's head of forensics denied the reports, state news agency MENA said on Tuesday.

"Everything published about this matter is completely false, and mere assumptions that did not come from the Forensics Authority," MENA quoted Hesham Abdelhamid as saying in a statement.

Nonetheless, the disclosure is likely to add to suspicions that the plane was destroyed by a bomb, even though no terrorist group has claimed responsibility for Thursday's crash.  

But the Egyptian head of forensics on Tuesday said any theories were based on assumption.

Officials say it is still too early to say what caused the blast and that so far no traces of explosives have been detected on the remains. Around 80 body parts have been recovered so far.

"The size of the remains points towards an explosion, the biggest part was the size of a palm," an official told Reuters, adding that about 23 bags of body parts had been collected since Sunday.

With the bodies in small pieces, Egyptian investigators will be heavily reliant on DNA to try to identify the victims.

A team from the forensic medicine institute went to a Cairo airport hotel on Tuesday morning to begin gathering DNA samples from family members of the victims.  

Other family members are going directly to the central morgue in Cairo's Zeinhom district to provide DNA samples.

France's aviation accident investigation agency would not comment on anything involving the bodies or say whether any information has surfaced in the investigation to indicate an explosion.

In a search for clues, family members of the victims arrived Tuesday at the Cairo morgue forensics' department to give DNA samples to help identify the remains of their kin, a security official said. The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

Egypt has dispatched a submarine to search for the flight's black boxes and a French ship joined the international effort to locate the wreckage and search for the plane's data recorders.

Ships and planes from Britain, Cyprus, France, Greece and the United States are also taking part in the search for the debris from the aircraft, including the black boxes.