Ukraine's state prosecutor said yesterday that criminal negligence caused the world's worst air show disaster, in which 83 people were killed and 116 injured at the weekend.
Four top military officials are in detention but formal charges have still to be laid following the disaster in which a Russian-built Sukhoi Su-27 jet fighter clipped the ground and tore through spectators, exploding in a ball of fire.
The two colonels flying the plane are in hospital after ejecting before the crash. Eighteen injured spectators are still in serious condition in hospital.
As Ukrainians prayed for the dead on a national day of mourning, Prosecutor-Gen Svyatoslav Pyskun said the pilots had been given a "wrong task" by their chiefs, who had flouted safety rules by allowing them to fly over the crowd. He said four top military officials, including the former Soviet state's air force commander, were in detention awaiting a court decision on whether to continue to hold them during an investigation into their "serious errors".
"It was negligence, military negligence. . .it was a crime committed by the military," he told a news conference, adding it was so far unknown why the plane had crashed. "There are also signs that there were criminal acts committed by the pilots," he said.
Most analysts have said spectators should not have been allowed to sit or stand under the flight path of planes taking part in the air show. They say the twin-engined jet that crashed was flying too low to complete a rolling turn.
Some mourners at the funeral blamed the military for allowing the plane to fly so close to the ground - a sentiment President Leonid Kuchma acted on swiftly by dismissing acting Defence Minister Petro Shulyak on Sunday.
The Defence Ministry banned all military flights except those necessary for the air force. The head of a commission investigating the crash, ex-Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk, said it was "already clear that several instructions of the Defence Ministry and air force need to be changed". Flags fluttered at half mast throughout Ukraine and black ribbons adorned buildings to mourn those who died on a sunny Saturday in the western city of Lviv. Grouped around charred grass and tarmac where the jet clipped the ground and exploded, families from Lviv let the tears run freely as priests prayed aloud for the souls of the dead. "This tragedy touched every Ukrainian, every person from Lviv. We will pray together for several minutes for the souls of those who died in the catastrophe so they rest in peace forever," a Catholic priest told the mourners. "I just cannot make sense of how big this tragedy is, how painful it must be to lose your child. We came here to show our sympathy," Ms Natalya Kovalyuk (37), sobbed. Some took flowers to a mortuary for their loved ones, still to be identified by officials. The Emergencies Ministry said they had identified 76 bodies. In another weekend air disaster involving a Russian-built plane, 14 flight and cabin crew members died when an Ilyushin Il-86 passenger jet crashed shortly after take-off from Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport on Sunday. There were two survivors.
- (Reuters)