Black boxes provide no clues in double crash riddle
Flight recorders from the wreckage of two planes that crashed almost simultaneously in Russia have not revealed reliable information on the causes of the double disaster, a top Russian official said.
Vladimir Yakovlev, the Russian president’s envoy for the southern region, where one of the planes crashed, said that the main theory about the catastrophe “remains terrorism", the ITAR-Tass news agency said.
Officials have said that several possibilities were being investigated as the cause of the crashes that killed 89 people late on Tuesday, including inferior fuel and human error and that they believed the planes’ “black box” recorders would clarify the situation.
However, Yakovlev said that the recorders “had alreadygone out of service before the fall of the airliners”, ITAR-Tass said.
The apparent failure of the recorders to provide significant information could increase what appears to be rising suspicion among Russians that the crashes were terrorist acts.
Those suspicions are bolstered by the crashes taking place just five days before a Kremlin-called election in warring Chechnya, whose separatist rebels are blamed in a series of suicide bombings in recent years.
Officials had expressed concern that militants might try to carry out attacks ahead of Sunday’s vote.
In the absence of firm evidence, many Russian newspapers drew strong, if speculative, connections with terrorism.
“Russia now has a September 11,” the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta said in a headline.
A government commission appointed to investigate travelled today to one of the crash sites, where a Tu-134 with 43 people aboard went down about 120 miles south of Moscow.
Workers ended their search work there, but were continuing to comb the other wreckage of a Tu-154 with 46 people aboard that fell to earth in southern Russia.
“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, was quoted as saying by ITAR-Tass.
President Vladimir Putin designated today as a national day of mourning.
