/ 26 August 2004

Terror mystery haunts jet disasters

Russian authorities struggled on Wednesday night to explain how two passenger aircraft had apparently blown up simultaneously in midair on Tuesday night, killing all 89 people on board.

The owners of the two aircraft, aviation experts and relatives of the dead said the coincidence was too great for it not to be a terrorist act. Russia’s security service, the FSB, said it had yet to find any evidence of a bomb or a hijack, although it did not rule out the possibility.

The two planes, a Tupolev-154, with 46 Russians on board, bound for the southern beach resort of Sochi, and a Tupolev-134, carrying 43 people to the southern town of Volgograd, took off on Tuesday from Moscow’s Domodyedovo airport at 9.35pm and 10.15pm respectively.

At 10.56pm, the 134 disappeared from air traffic controllers’ radar, falling from 10 000 metres to crash near the town of Tula, 200km south of Moscow. The 154 fell to the ground from its flight path three minutes later. Its remains were scattered across a field near Rostov-on-Don, 775km south of the capital.

President Vladimir Putin cut short his holiday in Sochi and ordered the FSB to investigate and set up a commission into the crashes. Last night he expressed his condolences to the victims’ relatives at a meeting with law enforcement chiefs, and declared today a day of mourning.

Security was stepped up at Russian airports, but the Kremlin made no official statement over whether the crashes were caused by terrorism.

Investigators in blue and orange overalls combed the wreckage of the two planes, their luggage, chairs, and twisted shells scattered amid the tall grass. The charred corpses of holidaymakers bound for Sochi, and businessmen heading to Volgograd, were found in the fuselages. All the passengers and crew were Russians, except for one Israeli businessman bound for Volgograd.

Eyewitnesses said they had heard explosions before both crashes. Sergei Korzayev, a resident of Buchalki, near Tula, told Rossiya state television: ”There was an explosion first, then the plane fell before I heard two more bangs. At first we thought it was thunder [from the storm raging], but it grew louder, like cannon fire, and then fell silent.”

The FSB said its initial investigations had yet to show ”any evidence that can confirm this was a terrorist act”. Sergei Ignatchenko, head of the FSB’s press office, said: ”We are working on all possibilities, including terrorism. We do not have any information about an explosion.” Poor safety, fuel, pilot error, plane maintenance and even bad weather conditions were also being examined, he said.

He declined to comment on any investigation into the passenger list, and said that six people who had been too late for the Sochi flight had had their baggage returned to them, and were simply ”lucky”.

The crashes came at a time of heightened alert in Russia, where elections for a new president in the war-torn republic of Chechnya will take place on Sunday. Chechnya’s last president, Akhmed Kadyrov, was assassinated by militant separatists in May, who have pledged further attacks on Russia in the run up to install a successor.

Akhmed Zakayev, a spokesperson for the Chechen rebels, said they were not responsible for the air disasters.

If Tuesday’s crashes were terrorist acts, they would be the worst loss of civilian life to terrorism in Putin’s four-year rule. Air travel is a vital bridge across Russia’s 11 time zones.

The owners of the second plane, the 154 bound for Sochi, said that the plane had sent an emergency signal moments before its crash indicating that it had been hijacked. But Sergei Kovalyov, president of Russia’s Federal Union of Air Traffic Controllers, said officials had told him the 154 had issued a general distress call, that did not specify the nature of the problem.

He said that normally a plane appears as a single line on the controller’s display, but when the distress signal is activated, another line appears. ”Then the controller will expect further information from the plane’s systems, giving its flight number, altitude, destination and also a [four figure] code which says whether it is either a technical problem, a radio fault, or a hijacking.” He said the 154’s crew did not have time to send this further information.

Yet he said he believed that terrorists were responsible. ”When you see two simultaneous, identical events, it is difficult to imagine anything else.” – Guardian Unlimited Â