Man held in air traffic controller murder probe

SWISS police yesterday arrested a man, who lost his wife and two children in a mid-air collision, on suspicion of stabbing to death the air traffic controller blamed for the crash.

Zurich prosecutor Pascal Gossner said the 48-year-old man has denied killing 36-year-old Peter Nielsen at his home on Tuesday night.

Gossner and the police said it could have been an "act of revenge". He declined to give the arrested man's nationality, although he said the man had only been in Switzerland since February 18, six days before the murder.

Gossner said the man's wife, son and daughter had died in a collision between a Russian charter airliner and a cargo plane over southern Germany on July 1, 2002.

The man had attracted attention with his angry appearance at a memorial service for the victims near the crash site.

Police had been hunting for a heavily built man aged 50-55 who spoke broken German. The killer fled on foot after stabbing Neilson repeatedly on the terrace of his home near Zurich airport. The air controller's wife witnessed the attack.

Evidence disclosed by investigators made it clear that the 48-year-old man who spoke only broken German appeared to be Russian.

"The man had an alibi for the time of the crime, and that is now being checked," said Georges Dulex, Zurich criminal police chief.

"The evidence so far, however, places the man in the centre of the investigation."

Gossner and Dulex declined to give the identity or nationality of the man, but an Associated Press story from the home town of Russian victims at the time noted that Alexander Savchuk lost his two children 12-year-old Vladislav and 13-year-old Veronika and his wife, Irina, who was an escort for the trip.

The collision over southern Germany killed 71 people, 45 of them prize-winning Russian schoolchildren bound for a Spanish holiday. At the time the planes were under Swiss air control.