MOSCOW, Aug 26: Russian investigators maintained Thursday that they were still pursuing all leads into the near-simultaneous crashes of two passenger planes hundreds of kilometres apart soon after they left the same airport.
Here are the main theories for the cause of the crashes being put forward by officials and media reports:
TERRORISM: Officials acknowledge that this is among the theories they are investigating. They have so far refused however to characterize terrorism as a favored line of enquiry or to qualify it any further.
Russian press reports slammed authorities for declining to say that terrorism was, according to the same newspapers, the most likely cause of the crashes. Those reports said the odds that two planes that left the same airport could have crashed within minutes of each other for any reason other than a terrorist attack were infinitesimal.
SABOTAGE: This theory differs in some measure from terrorism and has received almost no official mention. Investigators said soon after the crash however that they were inspecting fuel storage tanks at Moscow's Domodedovo airport and raised the possibility that the planes may have been filled with intentionally or unintentionally contaminated fuel.
The sabotage theory would also leave open the possibility that one or several airport employees may for whatever reason have tampered with the aircraft themselves.
TECHNICAL OR MECHANICAL INCIDENT: The possibility that contaminated fuel may have been pumped into the ill-fated planes also falls into this category. Other hypotheses that circulated after the crashes included metal fatigue or other structural flaws in both of the planes, along with oversights or errors in ground maintenance.
BAD WEATHER: Meteorologists said there was thunderstorm and wind activity in the area when one of the planes went down near the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. They said however that this was confined to an altitude far lower than that at which the Tupolev 154 plane was flying.
PILOT ERROR: Authorities insisted that they could not rule out some sort of pilot error in both crashes. Sibir and Volga-Avia Express, the separate owners of the two planes, said their pilots were highly experienced, and Russian press reports scoffed at the notion that two airline pilots might have made in-flight errors at almost precisely the same moments. -AFP
