Still, the preliminary discovery lends weight to the possibility that a bomb was to blame for the blast that tore through the Airbus 321 shortly after take-off from the Somali capital Mogadishu.
"There's a residue, they're saying, of explosives. ... There's a trace," Daallo Airlines CEO Mohammed Ibrahim Yassin said during an interview with The Associated Press at the carrier's corporate office in Dubai.
"But that cannot really make 100% that it's a bomb," he added, saying that he expects initial findings to be released in a matter of days.
The plane's pilot, Captain Vlatko Vodopivec, has said previously that he and others were told the explosion was caused by a bomb.
Yassin too acknowledged that a bomb could have been to blame, saying "we cannot exclude anything right now." He declined to speculate who might be responsible.
No group has claimed responsibility for the blast. Somalia faces an insurgency from the Islamic extremist group al-Shabaab, which has carried out deadly attacks in Somalia and neighbouring countries.
The Airbus A321 was carrying 74 passengers when the explosion struck. One passenger remains unaccounted for, though residents in the town of Balad, 30km north of Mogadishu, have found the body of a man who may have been blown from the plane.
All but four of the passengers originally had tickets with Turkish Airways and were rebooked on the Daallo flight after cancelled flights left them stranded in the Somali capital, Yassin said.
He suggested the Turkish Airlines' decision to scrap two flights may have been linked to intelligence it received about a possible security threat.
"We think, you know, Turkish airlines got a sort of security alert that they haven't passed to us," he said. He added that it is not unusual for flights in and out of Mogadishu to be cancelled at short notice.
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