The wreckage of a Russian airliner, which went missing on Tuesday night with 46 people on board, has been found near Russia’s southern city of Rostov-on-Don, emergency officials said on Wednesday, hours after another airliner, which crashed at the same time, was found south of Moscow with all 44 aboard dead.
The Tupelov Tu-154 airplane’s wreckage and body parts were found nine kilometres south of the Gluboky village in the Kaminsk-Shakhtinsky region, said the emergency ministry’s spokesperson.
Earlier the wreckage of a Siberian Airlines’ Tu-134 was found in the Tula region about 180 kilometres south of Moscow, with all 44 passengers and crew dead.
An air traffic control source told the Itar-Tass news agency that the possibility of a terrorist attack could not be ruled out.
Both airplanes left Moscow’s Domodedovo airport and dropped off radar screens within a minute of each other.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Tuesday night ordered the FSB security services to begin an investigation. The involvement of the FSB and an order for airport security to be tightened suggested the possibility that the incidents could have been caused by terrorism.
Confusion surrounded the fate of the second plane on Tuesday night, though Itar-Tass news agency reported emergency officials as saying that it had crashed.
There was also a report on Tuesday night on Interfax that witnesses near the scene of the crash of the plane bound for Volgograd had seen an explosion on board the Tupolev 134 before it hit the ground. Local officials told the agency the crash did not harm the local population.
Both planes were en route to southern Russia, a region under the threat of terrorist attack in the run up to elections for a new president in the war-torn republic of Chechnya. On Sunday voters will be asked to approve a replacement for Akhmed Kadyrov, former president who was assassinated in May.
Earlier this week, Putin made a whirlwind visit to Chechnya, laying flowers at the grave of the Kadyrov. He was in Chechnya for a few hours before returning to the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
In a separate incident earlier on Tuesday, a bomb went off at a southern Moscow bus stop, injuring four people, a spokesperson for the capital’s federal security service said.
The four injured included a woman stated to be in a serious condition at a Moscow hospital, the authorities said. A Moscow police spokesperson said officials were investigating the attack as hooliganism.
A series of explosions in recent years has claimed hundreds of lives, in blasts that have been blamed mostly on Chechen separatist rebels.
In Washington, a senior United States state department official said of the crash: ”We are obviously concerned by the news. We are following developments closely and trying to determine the facts.” – Guardian Unlimited Â