February 6, 2002	Wednesday	Ziqa’ad 22, 1422

VLADIVOSTOK, Feb 5: Russian military investigators are trying to recover missing parts of a fighter jet which hold some of the most jealously-guarded national secrets, officials said on Tuesday.

“Three top-secret devices are missing from a depot of the 11th air force and air defence army stationed in the town of Ussuriysk in the (Far Eastern) Primorye region,” a spokesman for the local military prosecutor’s office said.

The parts in question belong to the on-board electronic identifier from a Sukhoi-27 fighter jet. The system allows air defence radars to distinguish between friendly and alien craft in battle.

It was not clear if the recognition codes have been compromised. But their loss would require an overhaul of identification systems on all military aircraft and at every air defence unit as well as on warships, experts said.

That would cost Russia’s cash-strapped military millions of dollars, sums it can ill-afford at a time of slow and painful reforms which are already being undermined by a lack of finance.

The prosecutor’s office spokesman said the parts had been found missing two weeks ago and the officer in charge of the depot, who had retired shortly beforehand, was being questioned in connection with the incident.

The spokesman said the trail of the hardware remained cold.

Moscow last had to grapple with the loss of identification codes in 1976 when Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko fled to Japan in his then super-secret Mig-25 jet. Damage from his escape is estimated to have run into billions of dollars.

Security at Russian military depots has been lax since the demise of the Soviet Union triggered a sharp disintegration of the military.

Arms and ammunition are routinely stolen from army dumps while costly and sophisticated equipment often finds its way to junk yards, sold by underpaid officers as scrap metal for recycling.—Reuters