Former air force commander detained after Ukraine disaster

UKRAINE'S prosecutor general yesterday detained a former air force commander and three other top military officials, saying errors in preparing an air show had contributed to the deaths of 83 people when a fighter jet crashed into a crowd of spectators.

President Leonid Kuchma had sacked the air force commander, Volodymyr Strelnykov, on Saturday.

Interfax-Ukraine news agency quoted the prosecutor's office as saying that the former air force commander had been detained after an investigation found that there were "serious errors in organising, preparing and conducting flights, in particular organising demonstration flights in Lviv."

Meanwhile, relatives crowded hospital corridors yesterday seeking news of loved ones injured or missing when a jet crashed into spectators in western Ukraine, killing 83 in the world's worst air show disaster. Some searched for relatives to no avail as officials struggled to identify those killed when the Sukhoi Su-27 fighter plane clipped the ground and cartwheeled into a crowd on Saturday, exploding into a fireball.

Evhem Marchuk, secretary of Ukraine's defence and security council and head of the state commission into the accident, said investigators were analysing the flight recorder retrieved from the Russian-made fighter jet, which fell from the sky after failing to complete a tricky aerobatics manoeuvre.

Senior local officials said it was getting increasingly hard to identify the bodies, many ripped apart by metal shards from the plane which were flung across the Sknyliv military air field, on the outskirts of this picturesque city.

"Some of the bodies are so damaged that the final death toll could change by one body either way, but no more than that," said Mr Marchuk. "This is a terrible tragedy. A bitter lesson for the future, for the military but not only for the military," he said.

"There are two main versions of events. The first version is negligence on the part of senior management in the air force. The second version is that the plane failed." Local media blamed the tragedy on engine failure and witnesses said the engine went quiet before the jet plunged to the ground.