More Plane Bombs?

[SFL Cat]

Just heard on a talk radio show that over in Russia, they've lost contact with a couple of flights. No one is sure if they've crashed or what. 9-11 Russian style?

[SFL Cat]

On Fox News, they're saying one commercial airliner has crashed, another is missing.

[vtbub]

very little word.

Two planes, both Tupelov 154's, departing from the same airport, both crashing about 10 minutes apart.

Nothing on TV here.

[Schmidty]

Let's all work ourselves up!!!

*rubs hands together*

[JonInMiddleGA]

At the risk of being paranoid, bbc.com said Tass was reporting one plane down with 62 people on board. So I go check Tass, and don't see a story on the plane(s) but found this, apparently from sometime today.

http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=1168721
MOSCOW, August 24 (Itar-Tass) - There is preliminary information that the explosion at a Moscow bus stop resulted from a bomb equivalent to 100-200 grams TNT, a city police source told Itar-Tass.

Four people hurt in a Tuesday explosion at a Moscow bus stop were taken to the 7th city hospital and the Sklifosofsky Medical Emergency Institute, a source in the Moscow health department told Itar-Tass.

He said two sufferers had been moved to the intensive care unit.

Three sufferers are in the 7th city hospital, and one, a 21-year-old man, is in the Sklifosofsky Institute.

Point being, it looks like there's already been at least one terror attack by someone in Russia in the past 24 hours.

[Draft Dodger]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/08/24/russia.planecrash/index.html

(worth clicking on the link just to see various air travel ads tagged onto the article) :)

WORLD
Two Russian passenger jets crash

Tuesday, August 24, 2004 Posted: 6:04 PM EDT (2204 GMT)


(CNN) -- Two passenger planes have crashed in Russia Tuesday night, Russian officials and a news organization said.

A passenger jet carrying 34 passengers and eight crew members in the Tula region crashed about 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of Moscow, the ministry reported.

A second plane went down about 160 kilometers (100 miles) from Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, government-run news agency Ria Novosti reported.

A ministry spokeswoman said she could only confirm that the second plane had been lost to radar.

The first plane disappeared from radar at 10:56 p.m. (2:56 p.m. ET), a ministry spokeswoman said.

The Tupolev-134 had taken off from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport and was en route to Volgograd, in southern Russia.

The second plane, a Tupolev-154, disappeared at 11 p.m. (3 p.m. ET) after having taken off from the same airport en route to Sochi in southern Russia, Ria Novosti reported.

There was no immediate word how many people were aboard the second plane.

The Tupolev-154 is a standard medium-range airliner on domestic flights in Russia, according to aviation websites.

[vtbub]

BBC's report
BBC NEWS
Russia sees two airplane crashes
Two separate plane crashes have been reported in Russia.

A plane with 62 people on board has crashed in the Tula region in the centre of the country.

The Itar-Tass news agency reports that the plane went down near the village of Buchalki, about 180km (110miles) south of the capital, Moscow.

Meanwhile air controllers said they had lost contact with a second plane with 44 passengers on board, near the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.

It is not yet known whether there were casualities in either incident.

Emergency officials were quoted by the Itar-Tass agency as saying they had reached the site of the first crash in the Tula region, but there was no news on what they found.

The plane had disappeared off radar screens on its way to the southern city of Volgograd late on Tuesday.

The second plane, said to be a Tu-154 flying from Moscow to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, vanished when it was expected to be 140 km (90 miles) from the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, the emergencies ministry said, according to the Interfax news agency.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/3596354.stm

Published: 2004/08/24 22:13:22 GMT

© BBC MMIV

[Schmidty]

Not rubbing my hands together anymore. I apologize. Dead people does not equal entertainment. Thought it might just be a technical thing.

[CHEMICAL SOLDIER]

Well I think the next 24hours will be critical ffor another attack.

[Ksyrup]

Didn't see this thread before I posted mine. CNN is reporting that one of the planes gave off a hijack alert before exploding.

[Draft Dodger]

can you say "Cechnya"?

[Glengoyne]

can you say "Cechnya"?
Saying it is easier than spelling it.

Something I can't believe is that from what I've read the Russians didn't lock down their airports after this. Hell, I'll bet we considered grounding our planes. This may have been a bad thing for the Cechyn(sp?) rebels. Putin had already been campaigning for the U.S. to extend our war on terror to include these thugs. I can respect a cry for independence, but cant abide by terrorism and murder.

[yabanci]

maybe it's time for Russia to invade Venezuela and take control of its oil fields in the guise of a war on terrorism.

[stevew]

maybe it's time for Russia to invade Venezuela and take control of its oil fields in the guise of a war on terrorism.

Only if they place most of the blame on Carlos Zambrano, and leave Bobby Abreu out of it.

[stevew]

A wise man once said, Somebody tell me what's going on, We got human beings
Using humans for a bomb

[Blackadar]

Very odd.

[sterlingice]

Man, this is just odd. Nearly 24 hours later and still not much idea as to what happened.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=586&ncid=586&e=3&u=/nm/20040825/wl_nm/crash_russia_dc

Terrorism, Error May Explain Russian Plane Crashes
By Oleg Shchedrov

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Terrorism, human error or mechanical mishap could have caused one of Russia's worst air tragedies in which two planes crashed almost simultaneously and killed at least 89 people, officials said on Wednesday.

President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites), acting swiftly before Sunday's presidential poll in rebel Chechnya (news - web sites), ordered the tightening of security at all Moscow's airports and put the Interior Ministry in charge of screening procedures.

Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov told Putin he had no clear view of what happened to the planes, which took off from Moscow's Domodedovo airport late on Tuesday around an hour apart for two different destinations.

They crashed within four minutes of each other.

"We are examining a number of versions, among them a terrorist act, and human and technical factors," Ustinov told Putin during a meeting with the heads of the FSB security service and the Emergencies Ministry shown on television.

A Tu-134 flying to Volgograd went down near the town of Tula south of Moscow. Within minutes and 500 miles away, a Tu-154 bound for the Black Sea resort of Sochi crashed near the southern town of Rostov-on-Don.

The owner of the Tu-154, Sibir Airlines, said the pilots had triggered a hijack alert just before their plane crashed and the aircraft seemed to have exploded in mid-air. It was carrying 46 passengers and crew.

Volga-Aviaexpress, a small regional carrier which owned the Tu-134, said the crew did not report any problems on board before the plane crashed with 43 passengers and crew. The Emergencies Ministry later said 44 people were aboard.

Aided with cranes, investigators sieved through high grasses in almost identical countryside near the two sites. Huge slabs of twisted metal, seats and the odd piece of clothing were scattered over dozens of miles.

FSB IN CHARGE

Putin, who broke off his summer holiday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi to return to Moscow, had ordered the FSB to investigate the case, which it is normally only asked to do if terrorism is suspected.

He also ordered the government to transfer airport security measures to officers from the Interior Ministry and declared Thursday a national day of mourning.

Fear of attacks in Russia is high ahead of Chechnya's election. Separatist rebels have vowed to disrupt the poll.

Analysts said the chance of two planes crashing within minutes must have been more than a coincidental malfunction.

"It's freaky if it is not sabotage," said David Learmount, operations/safety editor at Flight International magazine.

The crashes came against a backdrop of violence in Chechnya, where Moscow has been battling separatists for a decade. Rebels launched a major raid in the local capital Grozny last week.

Moderate Chechen separatists denied any role in the crashes.

Asked if his group was responsible for the crashes, Akhmed Zakayev, a spokesman for Chechnya's separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, told Reuters in London: "Of course not."

"To us any form of terrorism is absolutely unacceptable. We have condemned it and continue to condemn it," he said.

One Middle East intelligence expert, who had no direct knowledge of the crashes, said the "first indications are that this is an operation by al Qaeda or a local sympathizer group." He said al Qaeda had been trying to make inroads in Chechnya.

Witnesses on the ground heard an explosion from the Tu-134 before it crashed 90 miles south of Moscow.

"Around 11 p.m., give or take five minutes, there was this strange noise in the sky, then this torn-up book fell onto our garage," a local man told NTV television, holding up the book with its tattered pages.

Local prosecutors opened criminal probes into both crashes. Investigators recovered the flight recorders from both planes and sent them to Moscow for analysis. Television reported officials hoped to have retrieved the information by Thursday.

[CHEMICAL SOLDIER]

It seems that like the o;d days Russian officials are trying to cover up the horrific events. Blaming the crashes on either mechanical failures or ''bad''jp8.

[andy m]

i never trusted the russians.

[duckman]

I think that they don't want to put the Russian people into a state of panic over the crashes.