July 3, 2002	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 21,1423

SALOU (Spain), July 2: It was to have been two weeks of fun and sun at a four-star Spanish hotel by a Mediterranean beach for the children from distant Bashkortostan, an oil-producing region in the depths of Russia.

Everything was ready for them at the Estival Park Hotel in the seaside resort of Salou. But the children never came.

Their holiday ended in disaster before it had begun when the Russian airliner carrying them to Spain collided with a cargo plane in a fireball over southern Germany on Monday, killing all aboard.

News of the tragedy stunned staff at the 550-bed hotel in the modern Costa Dorada beach resort, near Barcelona.

“We were expecting 43 children between 8 and 16. Everything was ready and the coach driver was waiting at the airport. It’s a terrible tragedy,” said a spokesman for the hotel, built just 200 metres from the beach.

“Plane crashes are always ghastly but knowing there were kids on board makes it even more so. Everybody in the hotel is affected by this, it’s a terrible blow,” he said.

Tourists were going about their lives as normal elsewhere in Salou, where the Estival Park is known as a popular holiday destination for Russians.

The children had been due in the early hours of Tuesday morning at Barcelona airport, where a coach was waiting to drive them 80kms southwest to Salou.

The group had been booked to stay at the Estival Park, complete with swimming pool, sauna, tennis and squash courts, until July 13.

“I guess they would have done the typical excursions that kids do here on holiday — go to the water park or visit the theme park,” said a spokeswoman for Tropical Tours, agent in Spain of the Russian agency organising the trip.

A senior official from Bashkirian Airlines, whose plane was carrying the youngsters, told reporters in Russia that the Tupolev 154 airliner had been chartered from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport only at the last minute because the youngsters had missed their original flight the previous day.

ELITE FAMILIES: Most of the children aboard were scions of the elite and linked to the regional administration of Bashkortostan.

“We get Russian groups every week in July and August,” said Victor Sitja, another spokesman for Tropical Tours.

“Some of this particular group were children of businessmen and politicians. It was not an educational visit, just sun and beach. Our groups are normally well-behaved and strictly controlled by the monitors,” he said.

‘DIVINE INTERVENTION’: Families along the shore of Lake Constance thanked divine intervention after tons of flaming wreckage crashing out of the sky from the freak aircraft collision missed their homes by a whisker.

Margarete Lenz thought the world was coming to an end when a piece of plane struck just about 50 metres from her house in the German town of Owingen, seconds after the mid-air collision.

“It just missed us,” said Lenz, 41. “The whole house vibrated. And then I saw a column of fire. We must have had a guardian angel looking out for us.

“My husband ran outside with a fire extinguisher. But I stopped him because I was worried about explosions.”

It appeared that, miraculously, no one on the ground was even hurt.

Aerial pictures of the burnt wreckage on the ground recalled the Lockerbie disaster in 1988, when a bomb destroyed a Pan Am plane above the small Scottish town and falling debris killed 11 people on the ground.—Reuters