Double Russian air disaster 'a terrorist act'

Suspicions grew today that terrorists were to blame for twin airline crashes, with a top official saying terrorism was the main theory and many Russians insisting the double disaster could not be explained by mere coincidence.

Vladimir Yakovlev, the Russian president’s envoy for the southern region, where one of the planes crashed, said the planes’ extracted data recorders had not provided the hoped for answers.

But the main theory “all the same remains terrorism”, he told Russia’s ITAR-Tass news agency.

Today was an official day of mourning for the 89 victims with Russia’s tricolour flag flown at half-mast and entertainment programmes cancelled.

But security experts came no closer to pinpointing what caused the two southbound planes to plummet into empty fields on Tuesday.

Officials had hoped that the so-called “black boxes” would provide the necessary clues, but Yakovlev told state-run First Channel that the recorders “turned off immediately” – an indication that whatever happened “happened very fast”.

Bombs, hijackers, bad fuel or human error – all theories, officially, are still open for investigation.

The planes – a Sibir airlines Tu-154 with 46 aboard and a Tu-134 with 43 passengers and crew belonging to tiny Volga-Aviaexpress airline – disappeared from radar almost simultaneously.

The Tu-134 was headed to the southern city of Volgograd and the other plane to the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, where President Vladimir Putin had been on holiday.

Both had taken off from the single terminal at Moscow’s newly renovated Domodedovo airport.

Suspicions of terrorism were bolstered by the crashes taking place just five days before a Kremlin-called election in warring Chechnya, whose separatist rebels have been blamed in a series of suicide bombings in recent years.

Sibir said it was notified that its jet had activated an emergency signal shortly before disappearing from radar screens. Officials said there were no indications of trouble with the other plane, but witnesses on the ground reported hearing a series of explosions.

A government commission, appointed to investigate the crashes, travelled today to one of the sites, where the Tu-134 crashed about 120 miles south of Moscow. Emergency crews had already completed their work there, but they continued to comb the wreckage of the Tu-154.

“There is still no clear-cut concept of what occurred, because the procedure of deciphering the data recorders will be conducted more than once,” Transport Minister Igor Levitin, who heads the commission, said.