Two Russian passenger jets crash

Thursday, August 26, 2004. Page 1.

Organized Attack or Tragic Coincidence?

By Valeria Korchagina and Lyuba Pronina
Staff Writers

With only three minutes separating the crashes of two planes from the same airport and a hijacking alert on one, the big question on many people's minds Wednesday was whether the unfolding story was part of an organized terrorist attack or a tragic coincidence.

The Federal Security Service, ordered by President Vladimir Putin to investigate, issued contradictory statements throughout the day Wednesday before settling on the theory that the crashes looked like accidents.

But aviation insiders and even a U.S. government official suggested something was awry.

"We have little information, but I have a bad feeling that it was organized," Aeroflot's security chief Azat Zaripov said.

"I could not rule out a terrorist attack as quickly as they seem to want to do it over here," said Paul Duffy, an independent aviation analyst.

The Federal Security Service, or FSB, was having none of that.

"So far there are no signs of terrorist acts taking place on board either plane," FSB spokesman Nikolai Zakharov said.

Investigators rolled out evidence disproving a terrorist attack. They said none of the recovered bodies had burns -- which would have been an indication of an on-board explosion. The hijack alert from the Sibir Tu-154, confirmed by air traffic controllers and Sibir, was in fact an SOS call. And they said their investigation will not focus on terrorism but violations of civilian aircraft rules.


The number of similarities in the crashes, though, is unusual. Both planes left Moscow's Domodedovo Airport within 40 minutes of each other. Both fell from the sky at about 11 p.m. Both were headed for cities in southern Russia.

Then, of course, there's the hijack alert on a plane heading to Sochi, where Putin was vacationing.

The nearly simultaneous crashes "in and of itself is suspicious," an unidentified U.S. official said in Washington on Tuesday night, The Associated Press reported.

The crashes fit into the Chechen rebels' pattern of bringing violence to the heart of Russia, said Peter Sederberg, a professor who specializes in international terrorism at the University of South Carolina.

"What if -- even if this is purely speculative -- they indeed were trying to crash it on Sochi? It would fit in as a very dramatic demonstration against one particular individual whom they identify as an enemy," Sederberg said.

There was no indication that this might have been the case Wednesday. Likewise, there was no sign that either of the planes might have been shot down.

Incidentally, just last week a senior air defense official expressed concern about the possibility of hijackers seizing a passenger plane and using it as a bomb. Colonel General Yury Solovyov, commander of the Moscow air defense system, told reporters on Aug. 17 that it would take hijackers just 40 seconds to reach downtown Moscow upon takeoff from Vnukovo Airport, which is located southwest of Moscow.

He said the law allows air defense forces to shoot down a hijacked plane -- but only if there is solid evidence that the plane has been hijacked and no one is on board other than the hijackers.

Izvestia reported Aug. 18 that the military is lobbying for the right to shoot down hijacked planes if there is a strong reason to believe they will be crashed in Moscow.

Concerns about terrorist hijackings were raised by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, and Chechen rebels have indicated that they are willing to use planes to attack Russian cities.

Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov told Reuters in a recent e-mail statement that "if Chechens possessed warplanes or rockets, then airstrikes on Russian cities would also be legitimate."

Maskhadov's envoy, Akhmed Zakayev, denied that Chechen rebels or Maskhadov were connected to Tuesday's crashes.

Federal authorities were clearly worried Tuesday night that a hijacking was in progress. The country's air traffic center fired off a telegram to airports nationwide just minutes after the Sibir plane sent the hijack alert.

"On 24.08.04 the markers for the Tu-154 and Tu-134 disappeared in the Moscow and Rostov zone controlling centers," reads the telegram, carried by Interfax. "One of the planes had the hijack alarm activated. I ask you to increase vigilance at airports during passenger checks and boarding."

But Valery Luchinin of the Flight Safety Department suggested Wednesday that the hijack button might have been accidentally activated once the plane began falling apart.

Both the captain and copilot have a hijack button by their foot pedals that transmits a "danger signal," Sibir deputy general director Mikhail Koshman said.

"The signal is a coded message to air traffic controllers that makes it clear the plane is being hijacked," he said.

He said Sibir was not ruling out any version of what might have happened.

The airline said separately that its jet exploded in midair.

Despite the FSB's insistence that the crashes were connected to violations of aviation rules, Domodedovo and Sibir stressed that the planes had been maintained in full compliance with the law. Airline representatives of the other plane, Volga-Aviaexpress, were unavailable for comment.

Crewmembers on both aircraft apparently did not report any technical problems while in the air.

Light will be shed on what actually happened only when investigators finish sifting through the debris and decipher the planes' flight recorders, which have been recovered, said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent defense analyst.

"If there were explosions on board, residual remains of explosives will soon be found on debris," he said. "And if the planes were shot down from the ground, there should be telling signs of shrapnel damage on what's left of the planes and the bodies."

He said he doubted the planes had been shot from the ground because there are no air defense forces in the areas where they went down.

Sibir said it highly doubted that air defense forces could have shot down its jet. "I doubt they would react so quickly," Koshman said. "It's unlikely. This is rather a scenario for American blockbuster films."

Russian investigators acknowledge terrorism as the probable cause of two nearly simultaneous Russian air crashes early this week. Why did it take so long?

After days of obfuscation, Russian investigators finally acknowledged Friday that terrorism probably downed two planes on Tuesday night, killing 90 passengers and crew. The jets, which left Moscow's Domodedovo airport 40 minutes apart and fell from the sky within three minutes of each other, were traveling to the southern towns of Sochi on the Black Sea and Volgograd, in the Russian Caucasus. After hinting for days that the tragedy was caused by everything from a thunderstorm to "a breach of civil aviation aircraft operation regulations," the FSB, Russia's top intelligence agency, said that traces of the explosive hexogen had been found at one of the crash sites and that authorities were gathering information on a Chechen woman who had boarded the Siberian Airlines flight. Russian press reports said investigators were also looking for relatives of a second Chechen woman who boarded the second flight.

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On Thursday, a group calling itself the Islambouli Brigade claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they were in retribution for Russia's war in Chechnya. "Russia's slaughtering of Muslims is still continuing and will not end except with a bloody war," the group wrote on an Islamic Web site. The attacks were apparently timed to coincide with the Chechen presidential elections this Sunday, where Kremlin backed leader Maj. Gen. Alu Alkhanov is expected to win by a wide margin.

Analysts said Russian investigators may initially have sought to delay their findings until after the election. Indeed, one unnamed FSB official quoted in the Moscow daily Kommersant, predicted the government would put off a thorough accounting of the crashes until next week. "It looks like before the Chechen presidential election the authorities simply do not want to admit an obvious fact: only Chechen fighters are capable of carrying out terrorist attacks of such scale," wrote the paper. According to the unnamed source in the story: "Next week things will clear up."

The government reversed course on Friday after newspapers began reporting details on the two Chechen women and by a statement made by Putin's special envoy to southern Russia, Vladimir Yakovlev, acknowledging that terrorism continued to be the government's main theory. His comments were at first contradicted by other officials and then hastily removed from TV news accounts.

Until Friday, there was a striking incongruity between the scope of the tragedy and the minimal reaction it elicited from the public and the government alike. A Siberia Airlines clerk who sold a ticket Wednesday morning for a flight from Domodedovo airport to Tbilisi seemed puzzled when asked if the flight might be cancelled. "All the flights are full, how can they cancel them?" she asked. A pilot aboard a Siberia Airlines flight to Moscow on Wednesday obligingly emerged from the cockpit midflight to offer an interview. No new antiterrorism measures had been put in place, he said. The ones initiated after September 11 were good enough. "You know, in Soviet times we used to carry guns," he said, pointing out how much safer things had become. Domodedovo reported few cancelled tickets and managed to keep most of its domestic flights on schedule; the airport was never shut down.

Perhaps passengers kept their cool because Moscow's main TV stations, all heavily influenced by the Kremlin, did not broadcast wall-to-wall coverage of the crashes, as would certainly have happened in the United States. Sveta Barinova, a product manager from Moscow, says she only learned about the disaster on Thursday when her company sent around e-mails warning employees to not fly through Domodedovo. "I decided long ago to stop listening to the news," she says, adding that she felt she had little control over events in her country, from elections to violent acts. "People have grown accustomed to being targets of terrorism," says Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Moscow Carnegie Center. "It's the Israeli situation. What do you do? You either quit, you go elsewhere or you stay and ignore the odds."

One of the prime suspects in last week's probable suicide bombing of two Russian airliners, a 27-year-old Chechen woman, was yesterday revealed to have had a compelling motive for her alleged actions: revenge.

Amanta (also known as Aminat) Nagaeva experienced the sharp end of the brutal decade-long conflict between Russia and the separatist region first hand, according to her neighbours in Chechnya.

Three or four years ago, one of her three brothers was suspected of terrorism and was abducted, apparently by federal Russian forces. Like many others who have suffered the same fate he has never been seen again and is presumed dead.

The Russian daily Izvestia said her profile fitted that of the archetypal Chechen female suicide bomber ­ Black Widows, as they are often known. "As experience shows, practically all the female suicide bombers who have blown themselves up in Moscow or the Caucasus were the wives of [rebel] fighters killed in battles with federal forces or had lost close relatives involved in the hostilities," the paper wrote.

"Nagaeva had an obvious motive to become a suicide bomber; by blowing herself and the plane up she was avenging her brother." Nagaeva was on a TU-134 bound for Volgograd which broke up in mid-air 120 miles south of Moscow, while the other prime suspect, a Chechen woman known only as S Dzhebirkhanova, was on a TU-154 heading for the Black Sea resort of Sochi which dropped out of the air within minutes of the other plane. Eighty-nine people died in the two explosions.

Investigators' suspicions were aroused when nobody came to identify the two women's bodies, and their fears that the catastrophe was man-made were confirmed when the FSB security service uncovered traces of a high explosive traditionally favoured by Chechen rebels in the wreckage of one of the planes.

The two women's behaviour was also suspiciously similar. Both checked in at the very last minute, provided minimal passport data to check-in and security staff and sat towards the rear of the planes near the toilets and the engines. Both also appear to have been at the very epicentre of the explosions.

In the case of Nagaeva, what remained of her body was spread over a wide area with investigators finding first a leg, then her head and finally her rib cage. Such a gruesome and wide distribution of body parts is familiar to Russian investigators. The body of the Chechen suicide bomber who blew herself up last December near the Kremlin was similarly dismembered.

The revelations of the women's apparent roles emerged as Russian authorities announced they had found traces of the explosive hexagon in the wreckage of the second airliner. The previous day, similar traces had been found in the wreckage of the TU-154 that crashed in southern Russia, evidence, said officials, that the plane was brought down by a terrorist act. Both planes crashed on Tuesday night after taking off from Moscow's Domodedovo airport, one of Russia's most modern and sophisticated air hubs. The findings of explosives indicated significant weaknesses in security for the air transport network that spans the sprawling country.

The timing of last week's tragedy was also significant; five days before today's presidential elections in Chechnya and close to what would have been the birthday of Akhmad Kadyrov, the previous Chechen president who was murdered in May. Chechen rebels are notorious for the strong sense of symbolism behind the timing of their attacks on Russian targets.

An obscure Islamist group called the "Islambouli Brigades" has also claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they were designed to punish Russia for its unofficial war in Chechnya. Investigators believe that the bombs, which may have been as small as a bar of soap or may have been in the form of the traditional suicide belt donned by Black Widows, were detonated in the toilets so as to immediately pulverise the planes' twin engines.

Russian media have speculated that the two women received inside help from someone working at Domodedovo to smuggle the explosives aboard. The firm in charge of airport security has already admitted that there are "holes" in the security screening process and that it only uses its best detection equipment on a selective basis.

Inspectors found serious shortcomings at the same airport in May, and in the wake of last week's double disaster President Vladimir Putin ordered airport operators to be stripped of their responsibility for security in favour of the Ministry of the Interior.

Mr Putin had hoped that today's presidential election in Chechnya (which is expected to be won easily by a Kremlin-backed candidate) would cover the republic in a Moscow-manufactured veil of normality. But that hope died with the two airliners' 89 passengers.

"When such a horrific terrorist act happens," said Masha Lipman of Moscow's Carnegie Centre, "the whole demonstration of a political process becomes futile."