MOSCOW – One of the two planes that crashed almost simultaneously in the Russian countryside this week fell apart in midair just moments after sending a distress signal, a senior official said Thursday, adding that the plane might have been destroyed by a terrorist explosion.
The presidential envoy who oversees southern Russia for the Kremlin said the evidence, while not conclusive, pointed to a violent destruction of the plane long before it hit the ground and he declared that the main theory for both crashes, whose death toll officials put at 89, “remains terrorism.”
The statements made by Vladimir Yakovlev contradicted those of investigators who, the day before, had largely discounted terrorism and cited human or technical error as the likely cause of the crashes. Yakovlev’s words proved so sensitive that, later in the day, another official dismissed him as unauthorized to draw conclusions and state television stopped showing the clip of him citing terrorism.
Critics contend that the government is avoiding any use of the word terrorism, at least until after a sensitive election Sunday in the separatist region of Chechnya. President Vladimir Putin, usually quick to blame Chechens when unexplained attacks occur, offered no theory Wednesday and remained out of sight Thursday.
Russian newspapers, which, unlike television, are not directly controlled by the Kremlin, were unusually blunt in criticizing the investigation. “The authorities are failing to see the links between the air crashes and the Chechen presidential election,” read a headline in Izvestiya.
The two passenger jets, one operated by Sibir airline and the other by Volga-Aviaexpress, took off from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport within 40 minutes of each other Tuesday night, heading to different destinations in southern Russia. Both vanished from radar within three minutes of each other, plummeting to the ground about 500 miles apart.
The chief spokesman for the Federal Security Service (FSB), Sergei Ignatchenko, said Wednesday that the black-box flight recorders from both planes were being analyzed. On Thursday, various officials said the black boxes either were switched off before the crashes or severely damaged by the jets’ impacts, and declared that it would be days, if not weeks, before they could be analyzed.
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