Cause of Russian double air disaster still a mystery
The riddle of why two Russian airliners crashed within a few minutes of each other is far from solved.
The Russian security service says it has not yet found evidence of terrorism – and it is hoping that the aircraft black box flight recorders will come up with information to explain what happened.
It has now been established that 89 passengers and crew died when the two aircraft came down after taking off from Moscow.
Wreckage from the first, a TU-134 bound for Volgograd, was found near the village of Buchalki, in the Tula region, about 125 miles from Moscow. The second, a TU-154, was heading for the Black Sea resort of Sochi and came down near the southern Russian town of Rostov-on-Don, 600 miles south of Moscow.
The operator of the second aircraft, Sibir Airlines, said it had received an “automatically generated telegram from the Sochi air control centre that the plane had been hijacked”.
However, Reuters news agency reported Russia’s chief prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov as saying that investigators were considering “a number of versions, among them a terrorist act, and human and technical factors.”
Meanwhile, security at Russia’s airports has been stepped up.
Report by News from Abroad
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