The Kremlin is facing growing public anger at its refusal to recognise Tuesday night’s double airline crash as an act of terrorism.
Officials continued to suggest on Thursday that it would take another two days for the investigation to draw any definitive conclusions. But the country’s press was united in insisting that the incident — in which two planes apparently blew up in mid-air simultaneously, killing 90 people — was another terror attack, presumably by Chechen extremists.
That theory gained weight on Thursday, when it was confirmed that the crew of one of the airliners had triggered the SOS button before their plane crashed. Although Vladimir Yakovlev, President Putin’s envoy to the southern region encompassing Chechnya, told the Itar-Tass news agency that the planes’ data recorders hadn’t provided any firm clues, he said terrorism remained the most likely cause.
The commission set up to investigate, headed by the transport minister Igor Levitin, headed for the crash scenes on Thursday, joined by a team of explosives experts from the Russian security services, the FSB, which had earlier pushed the idea that a technical error was to blame.
The two planes, flying out of Moscow, crashed on Tuesday at 11pm. A Tupelov-134 bound for Volgograd fell from the sky near Tula, about 200km from the capital, just as a Tupelov 154 heading to the southern beach resort of Sochi crashed near Rostov on Don. There were no survivors. Witnesses reported seeing explosions before the planes crashed.
The Kremlin has not yet officially backed Yakovlev’s assertion; analysts believe they do not want to admit that such a gross lapse in domestic security could occur in the run-up to vital elections in Chechnya.
On Sunday the republic will vote for a successor to Akhmad Kadyrov, the Chechen president assassinated in May.
The Russian media on Thursday said the Kremlin, already embarrassed by Kadyrov’s death and a recent series of daring attacks by militants, did not want to declare the cause of the crashes until the elections are over.
On Thursday, officials appeared to stall, saying the two recovered black boxes would take two days to examine. However Yakovlev said the boxes had already been examined and did not yield any useful information.
He told Rossiya state television: ”The tapes … did not show anything. Practically speaking [the data recorders] switched themselves off immediately.”
Yet there have been signs that Moscow will have to accept that the double crash was not an ugly coincidence.
On Wednesday President Putin ordered the drafting of emergency laws that would turn airport security over to the interior ministry.
On Thursday — a day of mourning in Russia — a policeman from the ministry was at each security point at Vnukovo, one of Moscow’s airports.
The Russian media, which often toes the Kremlin’s line on Chechnya, on Thursday declared the crashes the work of terrorists. Even the state newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta, carried an opinion piece on its second page titled ”The terror norm”.
The Nezavisimaya Gazeta carried the front-page headline ”Russia now has a September 11”.
The newspaper Kommersant said: ”It looks like before the Chechen presidential election the authorities simply do not want to admit an obvious fact: Only Chechen fighters are capable of carrying out terrorist attacks of such scale.”
It also quoted an unnamed FSB officer in Rostov on Don as saying: ”[After the poll] things will clear up. Until then, let the disasters be blamed, say, on technical fault or poor quality fuel. This is dictated by the situation.” – Guardian Unlimited Â