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Friday, August 27, 2004.
'Something Happened Fast' in Crashes http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/08/27/001.html By Anatoly Medetsky Staff Writer Flight recorders from two planes that crashed just three minutes apart Tuesday night are providing few clues to investigators but indicate "something happened very fast," a Kremlin representative said Thursday. The crashes of the Volga-Aviaexpress Tu-134 and Sibir Tu-154 after taking off from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport is increasingly looking like a terrorist attack, said the official, Vladimir Yakovlev. Thursday was a day of mourning across the country for the 89 people who died on both planes. National flags flew at half-mast. Theaters closed their doors, and television channels canceled entertainment shows. Yakovlev, the presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District, which includes a region where one jet went down, said the flight recorders "turned off immediately" in "probably the main affirmation that something happened very fast," Channel One television reported. He told Itar-Tass that the recorders "went out of service before the airliners fell." The main theory about the crashes "all the same remains terrorism," Yakovlev said. But the Federal Security Service continued to downplay any link to terrorism. Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov told President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that he could not rule out the terrorist angle. A senior air traffic controller said Thursday that all signs point to an organized terrorist attack. "Apparently explosives rigged with a timing mechanism were somehow delivered on board or suicide bombers were on board," said Anatoly Telegin, head of the Transportation Ministry's Urals air traffic control, according to Nakanune.ru, a regional news agency. "A plane can't fall instantaneously," Telegin said. If an aircraft has technical problems, pilots usually have time to report it to traffic controllers, he said. Speculation has swirled that the crashes might have been organized by Chechen rebels ahead of Sunday's presidential election in Chechnya. A rebel representative has denied this. In a sign that authorities suspected a terrorist act, Putin ordered the Federal Security Service, which is responsible for counter-terrorism, to investigate immediately after he learned about the crashes. Aviation authorities are usually assigned to investigations connected with pilot error or technical problems. In another sign, Putin on Thursday ordered the Interior Ministry, which includes the police and paramilitary troops, to take over security at the country's airports. Security had been handled by the airports. The Federal Security Service has good reason to distance itself from terrorism theories, as an attack would deal a heavy blow to its reputation. Details emerged Thursday about the exact times the jets had departed from Moscow and the scene at the crash sites. The Sibir Tu-154 took off first, at 9:45 p.m., after a 20-minute delay as airport staff removed a bag belonging to a group of passengers who missed the flight. The Volga-Aviaexpress Tu-134 took off 46 minutes later, at 10:31 p.m. The flight was delayed by 10 minutes as cabin crew waited for in-flight meals to be loaded. After disappearing from radar screens at 10:56 p.m., the Tu-134 fell upside-down near the Tula region village of Buchalki. The tail landed about 400 meters away from the plane's nearly intact fuselage, a Tula emergency spokesman said, Interfax reported. The bodies of all 43 people on board were recovered Wednesday. Two were Israeli citizens, David Coen and Eli Yaacovi, The Associated Press reported. Eyewitnesses said they heard several explosions before the plane hit the ground, but the Tula emergency spokesman dismissed a midair explosion because the fuselage remained intact, Interfax reported. The jet's engines might have failed, sending it spinning to the ground, he said. The fact that the crash did not spark a fire also suggests that the engines were not working when the plane crashed, he said. NTV reported that traces of flames were found on the tail near the engines, indicating a fire might have started there when fuel came into contact with the hot engines. Kommersant, citing unidentified counterterrorism experts, said a bomb with as little as 200 grams of TNT detonated at the tail would be enough to bring the plane down. The plane did not send a distress signal. The Sibir Tu-154 triggered a hijack alert before it disappeared from radar screens at 10:59 p.m. and crashed near the village of Gluboky in the Rostov region, Sibir and air traffic controllers said. But Transportation Minister Igor Levitin, who is heading the investigation of the crashes, said Thursday that it had been an SOS call, not a hijack alert. An unidentified official told Interfax on Wednesday as well that it had been an SOS call. All indications show that the Sibir plane broke apart in midair. Kommersant, citing rescuers and experts, said it broke in two at an altitude of about two kilometers, and the two parts landed about a kilometer apart. The parts fell straight down, judging by the absence of traces of friction on the grass, Kommersant said. The Emergency Situations Ministry said on its web site that passengers, their belongings and smaller pieces of the plane were found scattered in a 20-kilometer radius. The bodies of all 46 people on the plane had been recovered by Thursday afternoon. One of the passengers was a Ukrainian, Interfax said. Suspiciously, no relatives had called as of Thursday afternoon to inquire about a female passenger with a Caucasus-sounding last name -- Dzhabrailova -- on the Sibir flight, Levitov said, Interfax reported. He said his commission was investigating the woman, but added, "We have no information that she was a terrorist." Sibir said the cockpits of its planes are shielded by armored doors. Rescuer Vyacheslav Starostin said the cabin did not show any signs of fire, Kommersant reported. Levitin said the debris of the two planes was scattered in a similar pattern, Interfax said. He did not elaborate. He also said the "human factor" in both crashes was the same but did not elaborate, Interfax reported. Levitin said he did not see "a fatal coincidence" as the reason for the crashes because the planes were bound for different destinations and were at different locations when they fell, Interfax reported. He said, however, that investigators have to find out what happened "between the tail and fuselage," Rossia television reported. The tails of both planes were torn off. The five flight recorders recovered at the crash sites were badly damaged and data could not be retrieved from some of them, Levitin said. Investigators on Thursday were gluing together the tapes in the other recorders, said Oleg Yermolov, deputy chairman of the Interstate Aviation Committee, which is responsible for decoding recorders, RIA-Novosti reported. Levitin said investigators hoped to be able to start decoding the recorders by Saturday. Relatives of those who died began arriving near the crash sites Wednesday night from Sochi, Volgograd, Moscow and the Altai region, home of the Sibir crew. Levitov said relatives will be banned from visiting the sites for the next two to three days due to the ongoing investigation. |
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Russians Find Explosives on 2nd Plane
By STEVEN LEE MYERS Published: August 29, 2004 - NY Times MOSCOW, Aug. 28 - Investigators found traces of explosives on the second of two passenger airliners that crashed simultaneously in Russia, security officials announced Saturday, confirming that they consider the twin air disasters to be terrorist acts. Sergei N. Ignatchenko, chief spokesman of the Federal Security Service, said that the explosive hexogen was discovered in the wreckage of Flight 1303. On Friday, investigators said they had found traces of the same explosive at the crash site of Flight 1047. Izvestia reported that a women, who registered for Flight 1303 as Amanta Nagayeva, 27, was born in the Chechen village of Kirov-Urt. The newspaper quoted the village's administrator, Dogman Akhmadova, as saying that one of Ms. Nagayeva's three brothers had been seized by Russian forces three or four years ago and never seen again. |
#13
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Traces of explosives of the type used by Chechin militants has been
found on both wreckages. |
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