99 killed in Russia's worst military air disaster

Ninety-nine Russian servicemen were killed and 33 injured yesterday when a huge Mi-26 troop transport helicopter fell onto a Chechen minefield.

Local media called it the nation’s biggest military helicopter crash and the biggest number of lives lost in the second war in Chechnya.

Salvage workers have completed their search for victims at the site outside Khankala, Russia’s military headquarters for its campaign.

And Defence Ministry investigators have launched a probe into what caused the crash: a rebel missile, or a technical fault.

Prosecutors have opened a criminal case for murder and terrorism, Russian news agencies reported.

The helicopter was carrying 132 servicemen from Mozdok, another regional military base, to Khankala, local reports said, citing military headquarters in Chechnya.

Earlier reports ranged from 80 people on board, approximately matching the helicopter’s capacity, to 142 - half again as many as could have been on board safely. The five crew members all survived.

About half the passengers were officers, and the rest were conscripts and contract soldiers returning from leave or relieving units that were to have been rotated out of the region, RTR state TV reported.

Military headquarters said early today that 99 of the people on board the helicopter were killed and 33 injured, RTR reported.

Officials did not say why so many servicemen were on the flight.

However, the Kommersant business newspaper said today that Mozdok had suffered a spell of bad weather in recent days, with rain and heavy fog, and that flights had also been irregular because of inadequate supplies of fuel and spare parts.

Overcrowded flights, carrying up to 110 people instead of the 85 for which the helicopter was built, in addition to cargo, were normal, Kommersant said.

The paper described a horrendous scene of servicemen clambering out of the helicopter, only to set off explosions in the minefield planted to prevent rebel incursions into Khankala.

First-aid workers had to call in sappers to clear a path to the burning helicopter before they could begin work.

The crash came amid a spate of rebel actions against Russian forces in Chechnya, including attacks late last week in southwestern Chechnya that killed nine servicemen and five civilians.

Some analysts said the rebels had intensified their actions to underline to Moscow that it should enter peace talks.

A Chechen rebel representative met a former head of Russia’s Security Council in Geneva last week to discuss restarting talks that have been stalled since last year.

Russia’s government maintains that the war it launched in the breakaway Caucasus Mountain republic in 1999 is all but over, with just isolated groups of rebels holding out.

But Russian soldiers are killed almost every day in rebel attacks.