Confusion as giant Russian helicopter crashes
A giant military helicopter crash-landed in Chechnya today, injuring at least 25 servicemen, the Russian military headquarters said.
However the Itar-Tass news agency said 85 servicemen were killed.
And the Interfax news agency, citing a source in the military headquarters, reported that the aircraft was shot down by rebels and that according to preliminary information, about 10 soldiers were killed.
The Mi-26 helicopter, capable of carrying more than 100 troops, went down near the military headquarters at Khankala, not far from the Chechen capital Grozny.
Military headquarters in Chechnya insisted there were no deaths.
The head of the Defence Ministry press office, Nikolai Deryabin, told state television that the pilot had requested permission to perform an emergency landing because an engine was on fire. He said that 13 servicemen were taken to hospital, but offered no other details of casualties.
The military headquarters later said that there were at least 25 injured, but that fire and smoke from the crash hampered efforts to determine the full number of casualties.
Interfax, citing Deryabin, said 112 servicemen and five crew members were on board the helicopter.
The military headquarters in Chechnya said the wreckage was still on fire more than an hour after the crash, and that survivors were being evacuated.
The crash came amid a spate of rebel actions against federal forces, including attacks late last week in southwestern Chechnya that killed nine servicemen and five civilians.
Some analysts surmised that rebels had intensified their actions to underline to the Russian government that it should enter peace negotiations.
A Chechen rebel representative met Ivan Rybkin, a former head of Russia’s Security Council, to talk about restarting talks that have been stalled since last year.
The government maintains that the current war in Chechnya, launched in 1999, is all but over, with just isolated groups of rebels holding out. However, rebels unleash daily attacks that sap the military’s manpower and morale.
Most of the attacks are small-scale, targeting soldiers and Chechen police and civilian officials who cooperate with them. But the rebels have made some high-profile hits against top officers.
In September 2001, two generals and 11 other Russian servicemen died when their helicopter was shot down by a shoulder-fired missile shortly after takeoff from Grozny.
Another helicopter, an Mi-8 carrying two top Interior Ministry officials and 12 other people, crashed in Chechnya in January.
The Kremlin said that crash was due to an accident, but an official with the Moscow-appointed civilian administration for Chechnya said that investigators had found some fragments of the helicopter that suggested it, too, was hit by a shoulder-fired missile.
