The crashes 500 miles apart of two Russian airliners within minutes of each other having departed from the same airport could be a tragic coincidence. However, the possibility that these aircraft were downed deliberately cannot be ruled out.
Chechens were immediately suspect. The strife-torn region is due to go to the polls this Sunday to elect a successor to President Akhmad Kadyrov who was assassinated in February. Such an outrage would resonate with rebel tactics and the timing does seem significant. Yet the Chechens, who have rarely flinched from acknowledging past attacks, have denied they had anything to do with these aviation disasters. Unless a splinter group has perpetrated these crimes, there are reasonable grounds for accepting their insistence that they were not to blame. Russian crash investigators have both the black boxes from the downed airliners so they ought to be in a position to establish exactly what happened to each plane. Unfortunately it seems that key data from these devices are missing. One airliner apparently broadcast a hijack alert just before it crashed and eyewitnesses on the ground claim to have seen a midair explosion, therefore terrorism cannot yet be ruled out. However, if it was not Chechens, who could it be?
There will be speculation that this may be Al-Qaeda opening a new front. But none of the sympathetic websites that promote its cause has claimed responsibility. Suspicion is already turning to dark forces within Russia itself. It has been alleged that a number of bomb blasts in apartment blocks, which the authorities blamed on the Chechens, may have been caused by renegade elements within Russian intelligence, intent upon stirring up popular opinion against the Chechen rebels and in favor of the costly clamp down on their insurrection. Alternatively the Russian mafia has demonstrated its utter ruthlessness in suborning officials, politicians and businesses to its support. Could these attacks have been part of a wider campaign of intimidation to extort money or influence from the airlines or the government?
Finally, there is the possibility that both these aircraft plunged out of the sky because of technical failures. The country’s airlines have an extremely bad safety record. A cavalier attitude to basic maintenance and operational procedures has been responsible for a string of accidents in recent years. Black box flight recorders are supposed to survive the massive forces of impact with the ground and any subsequent fire. Yet first reports suggest that each device failed. President Putin cut short his holiday to return to Moscow where an aide reportedly said that the black boxes had switched off immediately, suggesting that there had been a catastrophic explosion. Had they been working properly, however, the instruments within them would have recorded much of what happened on board the aircraft before they plunged toward the earth. Has this information also been lost through poor maintenance? Or deliberately? Only careful examination of the wreckage will solve this double puzzle.
