UFA, Russia, 3 July — A fateful last-minute decision sent 52 holiday-bound children, most of them Muslims, and at least 19 other people to their deaths in a midair collision between a Russian airliner and a cargo jet over southern Germany.
Distraught parents and airline officials said yesterday the children had missed their original flight connection to Barcelona, and had been put on a special charter flight which left Moscow for the Spanish city late on Monday.
An official at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport said a cargo plane would fly to Germany on Wednesday to bring back the bodies of the victims.
Around a dozen Russian crash investigators arrived in southern Germany late yesterday to help with the investigation.
Sergei Rybanov, a senior official from Bashkirian Airlines, whose plane was carrying the youngsters, said the charter was enlisted in part because the children came from the oil-rich Bashkortostan region, the airline’s home base.
“It was not a planned flight...but (the youngsters) were delayed. Because they were from Bashkortostan, we met their request (for a charter flight),” Rybanov said. Prosecutors in Moscow and Bashkortostan will also investigate the accident.
The beautiful countryside around Lake Constance is the setting for a cluster of residential schools for mentally disabled children, a region far from the stresses of modern life where they can live and learn in peace. Yesterday, that peace was shattered as people told of the night that bodies came down “like black rain”. In spite of the efforts of more than 800 emergency workers, who toiled through the night searching for victims, some of the residents of these fragile communities, run by the Camphill charity, witnessed distressing scenes, including the remains of some who perished.
“The children heard the planes crashing into each other and saw the debris falling from the sky,” said the relative of a youngster at a settlement in Brachenreuthe. “It was like an earthquake. My brother, who lives there, called me in tears over what had happened. The area was sealed off and they gathered all the mentally disabled children together for a long talk about what they had seen. These are fragile people and they were very distressed.”
Television pictures showed grief-stricken relatives, faces stained with tears, gathering at the regional administration office in Bashkortostan for news and applying for passports to travel to Germany.
“If they had flown on time none of this would have happened,” cried the mother of 14-year-old Bulat Biglov, who was killed in the disaster.
Russian officials said that 52 children and teenagers from the republic of Bashkortostan were among the 69 people aboard the Bashkirian Airlines flight. Two pilots, a Briton and a Canadian, were on the Boeing 757 cargo plane which had no passengers and was operated by DHL. All were presumed dead.
The children traveling were star students who had won the trip for outstanding performance in school, according to a government minister from Bashkortostan. The holiday was sponsored by a national organization affiliated with UNESCO.
Russian officials and Swiss air traffic controllers, who were monitoring the airspace around Lake Constance, appeared to be at odds over the cause of the crash.
“It seems that there is a human factor at work here,” a senior official of the Russian Transport Ministry, Alexander Neradko, said, without saying who he thought was responsible — the Russian crew of the Tupolev 154 jet or the two-man crew of the cargo plane. One witness said the Monday night crash, about 35,000 feet above Ueberlingen, caused a fireball followed by a black rain of wreckage tumbling to earth close to Lake Constance. Swiss air traffic controllers said the pilot of the Bashkirian Airlines jet flying to Barcelona reacted too slowly to orders to lower its altitude, and collided with the cargo plane. (The Independent)
