By MIKE ECKEL - Aug 25, 11:10 PM (ET
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 stressed that 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, some 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 engines quit. "I would expect some communication from the crew that we're having trouble," he said.
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 televised meeting about the Tuesday night crashes.
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