Officials differ over cause of Russian air crashes

RUSSIA: Russian officials clashed yesterday over whether a terror attack caused two airliners to crash within minutes of each other, but a cabinet minister said investigators were studying the role that a female passenger with a Chechen name had played in the fate of one of the aircraft.

"The crew of the Tu-154, that crashed in the Rostov region, activated an SOS alarm, but no voice confirmation was received from them," said Transport Minister Mr Igor Levitin, a day after 89 people died in mysterious crashes that sparked fears of a suicide hijacking by Chechen rebels ahead of Sunday's presidential election in the republic.

"Right now we are studying all possible theories regarding the tragedy, including why none of the relatives of passenger Dzhabrailova have tried to find her," he said.

Mr Levitin added: "We have no information that she was a terrorist."

Moderate separatist leaders in Chechnya have denied any link to the disappearance from radar screens of a Tu-134 and Tu-154 on Tuesday night, as they flew south to different destinations from the same Moscow airport.

Mr Levitin and other officials said no conclusion on the cause of the crashes was likely until the black-box flight recorders had been studied for clues regarding the final moments of the aircraft.

"We have no clear idea today on what has happened. Not all the flight recorders are in a fit state to be read immediately. Experts will work on them today and tomorrow to make the tapes easier to read," he told NTV television.

But other officials said the black boxes were too badly damaged to yield useful information. However, the Kremlin envoy for southern Russia, Mr Vladimir Yakovlev, said the fact that they had stopped working in mid-air suggested an on-board catastrophe.

"The tapes did not show anything. Practically speaking they switched themselves off immediately. And so we failed to get any information," Mr Yakovlev said. "This is probably the main affirmation that something happened very fast . . . the main theory remains that of terrorism."

Sibir airlines, which operated the aircraft that went down in the Rostov area, said its crew had sent a final, hijack alert message before contact was lost.

But officials from the FSB security service that used to be run by President Vladimir Putin insist there is no evidence of a terror attack.

Mr Putin declared a national day of mourning for victims of the crashes, which sent shockwaves through Russia as it braced itself for Chechen elections that the region's rebels have vowed to disrupt as part of their second war with Moscow in a decade.

Flags flew at half-mast and light entertainment shows were dropped from television out of respect for the victims, as relatives went to the crash sites to identify their kin.

The Kremlin insists that peace is taking hold in Chechnya and its guerrillas are a spent force, four years after Mr Putin came to power on a vow to destroy them.

But the confusion over the cause of the air crashes prompted an outraged response from many of Russia's newspapers, which have remained critical of the Kremlin even as national television has fallen under state control in recent years.

"Ahead of presidential elections in Chechnya, the authorities do not want to admit the obvious fact: that only Chechen rebels can organise attacks on this scale in Russia," the business daily Kommersant commented on its front page.

"Next week (after the poll) things will clear up," the newspaper quoted an unnamed FSB member of the investigation team as saying. "Until then, let the disasters be blamed, say, on a technical fault or poor quality fuel: the situation demands it."

The Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper drew its own stark conclusion.

"Russia now has its own September 11th," its headline said.