Two Russian Airliners Crash Minutes Apart

Two Russian aircraft, a Sibir airline flight from Moscow to Sochi and the Volga-Aviaexpress airline flight from Moscow to Volgograd (Stalingrad), suddenly crashed just minutes apart last week. Yesterday, President Putin's spokesman, Vladimir Yakovlev, told Reuters, "The tapes . . . did not show anything. Practically speaking they switched themselves off immediately. And so we failed to get any information." Much, however, may be inferred without crossing the line into paranoia, and it is reasonable to believe Chechen terrorism has struck again.

At any one time, there are thousands of aircraft flying between the world's cities. Statistically, it is rare for one to crash (a tribute to the safety record of the industry). For two to crash on the same day is possible under the laws of probability but remotely so. For two to crash on the same day having left the same airport is even more remote. Occam's Razor offers a far more likely explanation -- someone arranged for the 89 people on the two planes to die as a deliberate act of terrorism.

And why were Mr. Yakovlev's statements immediately repudiated by Transportation Minister Igor Levitin? The minister told NTV in Russia, "We have no clear idea today on what has happened. Not all the flight recorders are in a fit state to be read immediately. Experts will work on them today and tomorrow to make the tapes more acceptable for reading . . . . Yakovlev does not have any links with the [investigating] commission." And no one is disrupting that the Sibir Tu-154's pilots had set off the hijack alarm right before the end.

One only needs to look at Chechnya, a part of Russia that some locals would like to be separate from Russia. The record of Chechen resistance to Moscow includes bombing in the Russian capital itself. And there is an election Sunday to rubber stamp the election of the Chechen region's president (who was hand picked by Mr. Putin after his first choice was blown up by terrorists). Kommersant, a daily newspaper, summed it up, "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."

After the election, the attack on the Russian aircraft will make a fine pretext/reason for clamping down harder on Chechnya. But first, the Kremlin's man, Akhmad Kadyrov, must get elected "fairly." So until then, the cause of the disaster will be bad fuel or something else that won't stand up more than a few days. But then, it doesn't have to hold up past Sunday.


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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