BUCHALKI, Russia – Russian investigators labored Wednesday to determine whether terrorism caused the near-simultaneous crashes of two jetliners, killing all 89 people aboard and spreading anxieties about a possible bloody escalation of the Chechen conflict.
Officials said no evidence of a terrorist attack had yet been found among charred wreckage and said they opened a criminal investigation as they looked into other causes like bad fuel, equipment malfunction and human error. The planes’ data recorders were recovered, but experts were only just starting to retrieve information from them.
The planes crashed just days before a Kremlin-called presidential election in Chechnya, whose rebels have staged suicide bombings and other attacks across Russia in recent years, including the 2002 seizure of hundreds of hostages at a Moscow theater.
Witnesses reported hearing three explosions before a Volga-Aviaexpress airline Tu-134 went down in a field near Buchalki, about 125 miles south of Moscow, with 43 passengers and crew.
The wreckage of a Sibir airlines Tu-154 with 46 people aboard was spread over a few hundred yards in a rugged field near Gluboky in the region of Rostov-on-Don, about 600 miles south of Moscow. The Tu-154 jet had activated a signal indicating the plane might have been hijacked or in distress.
Reports of far-flung wreckage suggest an explosion may have preceded a crash, said Jim Burin of the U.S.-based Flight Safety Foundation. He also said bad fuel could cause an airplane’s engines to fail, but the crew likely would have reported it well before the engines quit.
Russian authorities had expressed concern that Chechen separatists might stage new attacks before the Sunday vote, but there was no rush by officials to tie the crashes to Chechnya – a determination that would underline the government’s failure to quell the decade-old insurgency.
“Several versions are being examined, including a terrorist attack, and other possibilities – the human and technical factor,” Russia’s top prosecutor, Vladimir Ustinov, told President Vladimir Putin during a meeting about the Tuesday night crashes.
Ustinov said the Prosecutor General’s Office had instituted criminal proceedings into both crashes and sent two teams of investigators to the crash sites, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. The teams are headed by his deputies.
The planes took off about 40 minutes apart from the single terminal at Moscow’s newly renovated Domodedovo airport, about 14 miles outside of Moscow. They both crashed a few minutes apart just before 11 p.m., according to initial time estimates.
Outside experts expressed skepticism that anything but violence could be behind two planes crashing at almost the same time hundreds of miles apart.
“That’s pretty far out there on the chance bar,” said Bob Francis, former vice chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
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