It has been revealed that air France received a telephone bomb threat just days before Air France flight AF447 disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday night.

Officials at Argentina’s Buenos Aires’ Ezeiza Airport held the Paris-bound Air France flight for 90-minutes while Brazilian Federal Police, firefighters and airport security personal inspected the plane.

Airport authorities in Argentina said no explosive device was found and the passengers were not evacuated during the inspection.

Just four days later Air France flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro disappeared with 228 people on board while four hours in to an 11-hour flight to Paris.

Yesterday Brazilian search and rescue teams located a five-kilometer (three mile) long debris trail about 700 kilometers (435 miles) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha archipelago

French Defense Minister Herve Morin has said an act of terrorism cannot be ruled out in the disappearance and crash of Air France flight AF447.

Morin told Europe 1 radio, “we can’t rule out a terrorist act since terrorism is the main threat to Western democracies, but at this time we don’t have any element whatsoever indicating that such an act could have caused this accident.”

A race against the clock is now on to find the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, commonly referred to as black boxes, before they stop transmitting a location identifying “ping”.

A French ship is on its way to the zone, carrying two mini-submarines capable of operating at depths of 6,000 meters (19,700 feet), which is also the limit aircraft black boxes can survive for up to 30 days.

However, grave doubts have been expressed as to whether the recorders, thought to be up to three kilometers (1.86 miles) below the ocean surface, will ever be found.