The downing of one of two Russian passenger jets that crashed nearly simultaneously earlier this week was an act of terrorism, investigators said Friday after finding traces of an explosive amid the wreckage of one of the airliners.
Initial tests have shown that small amounts of an explosive called hexogen were found on fuselage debris of the Sibir Airlines jet that crashed in southern Russia late Tuesday after taking off from a Moscow airport, said Nikolai Zakharov, a spokesman for Russia’s Federal Security Service, known by the acronym FSB.
All 46 passengers and crew were killed. Another airliner bound for Volgograd that took off from the same airport 55 minutes later crashed about the same time 120 miles south of Moscow, killing all 44 people aboard. Tests were under way to determine whether any trace of explosives could be found in the wreckage of the Volgograd-bound airliner, Zakharov said.
Zakharov said the FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, has developed a list of suspects in the Sibir crash. “We have determined persons who might be involved in this terrorist act,” he said.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said evidence was growing that both air disasters were “acts of terrorism.”
The discovery of bombmaking material at one of the crash sites deepened fears among Russians that the disasters were not a tragic coincidence, as Russian officials initially theorized, but a highly coordinated attack.
It also heightened concern that Russia’s decade-long conflict with separatists in the mostly Islamic republic of Chechnya was again wreaking havoc well outside the tiny southern province’s borders.
Those worries were bolstered by an Islamic militant group’s claim on a Muslim Web site that its fighters had hijacked both airliners in retaliation for the deaths of Chechen Muslims.
Calling itself the Islambouli Brigades, the group said: “Muslims are being killed by Russian soldiers in Chechnya, and this will stop only if we wage war with Russians. Our mujahedeen managed to strike the first blow, which will be followed by a series of other operations.”
Islam experts say several Muslim extremist groups invoke the name of Lt. Khaled Islambouli, who led an ambush that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in Cairo in 1981. Last month, a group that called itself the Islambouli Brigades of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for an attempt on the life of Pakistan’s prime minister-designate.
There was no way to verify the group’s claim, and Russian FSB officials declined to comment on the Web site statement.
Probe focuses on 2 women
Meanwhile, Russian officials said they were focusing attention on two Chechen women who were passengers on the downed flights.
Russian investigators said they were investigating the women in part because no relatives of either woman contacted authorities after the crashes. One woman, described by investigators as Amanta Nagayeva, bought a ticket for the Volgograd-bound flight only an hour before takeoff, Russian television reported. The other, identified by officials only as S. Dzhebirkhanova, was a passenger on the Sibir flight bound for the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Chechen rebels have increasingly relied on female suicide bombers to unleash terrorist attacks throughout southern Russia and in Moscow. Women, often the widows or relatives of dead Chechen fighters, have been involved in the 2002 theater takeover in Moscow that killed 129 people, as well as a suicide bomb attack at a Moscow rock concert last year that killed 15.
The Russian media and several Chechen affairs experts have speculated that the airliner crashes were terrorist attacks aimed at casting a pall over Sunday’s presidential election in Chechnya, a contest the pro-Kremlin candidate is expected to win. Alu Alkhanov, Moscow’s handpicked choice for the post, would succeed another pro-Kremlin leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in a bomb blast blamed on Chechen rebels last May.
Though Chechen rebels have been blamed for terrorist attacks that have killed as many as 500 people in recent years, they have never been tied to a hijacking or bombing of a passenger jet. Experts say a link between the guerrillas and this week’s airliner crashes would signal a grave shift in tactics, one that Russian aviation security has been ill-prepared for.
“It’s extremely significant in that it’s an entirely new tactic,” said Vitaly Naumkin, chief of the Arabic Studies Center at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “There have been no such terrorist attacks of this kind in this country. And I’m sure they will continue to look for weak points in Russia’s national security.”
Baggage rarely checked
Naumkin and other experts said this week’s airliner disasters are likely to galvanize support for tougher measures at airports, which have been criticized in the past for lax scrutiny of passengers and baggage.
Checked baggage is rarely scrutinized carefully at regional airports, said aviation expert Oleg Panteleyev. And the country’s larger international airports lack sophisticated technology to detect materials such as hexogen, a powerful agent that can be mixed with oils or waxes to make a plastic explosive, Panteleyev said. Hexogen was the explosive agent used in a series of Russian apartment bombings in 1999 that killed nearly 300 people and were blamed on Chechen rebels.
After Tuesday’s jet crashes, Russian President Vladimir Putin took responsibility for aviation security from the airports and handed it to Russia’s Interior Ministry. In addition, sophisticated explosives detection technology will be installed at airports, Panteleyev said.
Whether tighter security at airports reassures Russian air travelers rocked by this week’s events remains to be seen. Passengers at Domodedovo International Airport said their worries about security at Russian airports grew with news Friday that at least one of the airliners probably had been downed by a terrorist attack.
