MOSCOW, Aug 25: Two Russian passenger planes crashed almost simultaneously, killing all 89 people on board in what investigators said on Wednesday was probably a freak coincidence but might have been a terrorist attack.
The planes took off from the same Moscow airport and disappeared from air traffic controllers' radar screens within minutes of each other late on Tuesday. The crash sites were some 800km apart.
One plane, carrying 46 passengers and crew bound for the Black Sea port of Sochi, sent a hijack alert before crashing. President Vladimir Putin, vacationing in Sochi, ordered the FSB security service to investigate the crashes ahead of Sunday's presidential election in Chechnya. Rebel separatists have threatened to disrupt the poll with violence.
"The main line of inquiry we are following is violation of the rules of operating civil aircraft," FSB spokesman said. He said this meant pilot error, mechanical defects or problems with fuel quality - prime suspects in Russia, where pilots are poorly paid and planes often old.
"We are also examining the possibility of a terrorist act, but we have no evidence to support this." Sibir Airlines, operator of Flight 1047 to Sochi, said the alert had been triggered when the pilot of the Tu-154 plane pressed a concealed button before the plane came down near the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
"The message was generated right before all contact was lost with the plane and it disappeared from radar screens," Sibir, Russia's number two airline, said in a statement. Witnesses on the ground heard an explosion from the second plane, Volga-Avia express Flight 1303 to Volgograd with 43 on board, before it crashed near Tula, 150km south of Moscow.
Local prosecutors opened criminal probes into both crashes. Investigators recovered the flight recorders from both planes and sent them to Moscow for analysis by crash investigators.
Earlier, an aviation source quoted by Interfax news agency said the coincidence of both planes leaving from the same airport and disappearing at the same time would suggest it was "a planned action".
"In such a situation one could not exclude a terrorist act," the source was quoted as saying. The airport gave the final toll as 89, all Russian citizens except for an Israeli man.
Security was tightened at Russian airports, where passenger checks on internal flights are often cursory - the kind of loophole exploited by the perpetrators of the Sept 11, 2001, suicide hijack attacks in the United States.
The incidents came against a backdrop of mounting violence in Chechnya, where Moscow has been battling separatists for a decade. Rebels launched a major raid in the local capital Grozny last week. -Reuters
