Ninety-nine servicemen were killed and 33 injured when a troop transport helicopter fell into a minefield in what Russian media called the nation’s biggest military helicopter crash and the biggest single-day casualty count in the second Chechen war.
Salvage workers have completed their search for victims at the site outside Khankala, Russia’s military headquarters for its nearly three-year old campaign in Chechnya, where the Mi-26 crashed on Monday, RTR state television reported on Tuesday.
Defence Ministry investigators have begun their probe into what caused the crash: a missile, which rebels claim, or a technical malfunction. Prosecutors have opened a criminal case for murder and terrorism, Russian news agencies reported.
The helicopter was carrying 132 servicemen from Mozdok, another regional military base, to Khankala, RTR reported, citing military headquarters in Chechnya. Earlier reports ranged from 80 people on board, approximately matching the helicopter’s capacity, to 142 – half again as many as could have been aboard safely.
The five crew members all survived. About half the passengers were officers, and the rest were conscripts and contract soldiers returning from leave or travelling to Chechnya to relieve units that were to have been rotated out of the region, RTR reported.
Military headquarters said early on Tuesday that 99 of the people aboard the helicopter were killed and 33 injured, RTR reported. Officials did not say why so many servicemen were on the flight.
However, the Kommersant business daily reported on Tuesday that Mozdok had suffered a spell of bad weather in recent days, with rain and heavy fog, and that flights had been irregular in any case because of inadequate supplies of fuel and spare parts. Overcrowded flights, carrying up to 110 people instead of the 85 for which the helicopter was built, in addition to cargo, were the norm, Kommersant said.
The paper described a horrendous scene of servicemen clambering out of the helicopter, only to set off explosions in the minefield planted to prevent rebel incursions into Khankala. First-aid workers had to call in sappers to clear a path to the burning helicopter before they could set to work.
The crash came amid a spate of rebel actions against Russian forces in Chechnya, including attacks late last week in southwestern Chechnya that killed nine servicemen and five civilians.
Some analysts surmised that rebels had intensified their actions to underline to the Russian government that it should enter peace negotiations. A Chechen rebel representative met last week in Geneva with a former head of Russia’s Security Council, to discuss restarting talks that have been stalled since last year.
Russia’s government maintains that the war it launched in the breakaway Caucasus Mountain republic in fall 1999 is all but over, with just isolated groups of rebels holding out. However, Russian soldiers are killed almost every day in rebel attacks. – Sapa-AP