Security services and minister say act of terror not being considered though cause of Syria-bound jet crash still unclear

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Russian authorities say they do not believe a terrorist attack was responsible for the crash of a Syria-bound military plane with 92 people on board. However, the cause of the crash is still unclear: the main possibilities under consideration are pilot error, technical malfunction, poor quality fuel or an unidentified object lodging in the engines.

Early on Tuesday, the Russian defence ministry confirmed it had found a flight recorder from the Tu-154 jet.

The aircraft, which was carrying more than 60 members of the internationally renowned Red Army choir to entertain Russian troops in Syria for the new year, went down off the resort city of Sochi shortly after takeoff early on Sunday morning. From the start, there was little hope that any passengers had survived the crash.

More than 3,000 rescue workers laboured through the night, racing to find the remaining bodies and debris before the currents carry them further away from shore.

The first 10 bodies have been flown to Moscow amid a national outpouring of grief.

The FSB security services said on Monday that terrorism was not deemed a likely cause, as did the transport minister, Maksim Sokolov, in a televised briefing.



“Currently, the main versions do not include an act of terror,” he said. “There could be various causes – they are being analysed by specialists, experts, the investigative committee.”

Vladimir Putin orders probe into military plane crash with 92 lost Read more

The search operation included 39 vessels covering more than 100 sq km (38 sq miles), with planes, helicopters and drones searching from above and deep-water equipment and divers hunting below the surface.



“I think we will be able to find the location of the plane on the bottom of the Black Sea today,” Viktor Bondarev, the commander of the Russian air force, told Russian agencies.

“When we find the plane, we will raise the flight recorders to the surface. We know they are located in the tail and I am sure that the tail was damaged the least,” he said.

On Monday, evening, agencies reported that parts of the fuselage had been found and lifted from the seabed, but the black boxes had not yet been found.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman lays flowers at Sochi airport the day after the plane crash. Photograph: Yekaterina Lyzlova/AFP/Getty Images

Sokolov said some of the bodies could have already been carried off by the current to Abkhazia, the separatist region of Georgia. Search operations were under way there too.

By Monday evening, 13 bodies had been found, as well as more than 150 body fragments.

“The search is complicated by the large depth range and the sea bottom relief characteristics in the presumed crash area,” Igor Konashenkov, a defence ministry spokesman, said in a briefing.

Along with the first 10 bodies, 86 body parts were flown to the capital for DNA analysis, he added.

The passenger jet went down at 5:25am local time (0225 GMT) on Sunday, minutes after taking off from Sochi’s airport where it had stopped to refuel after flying out from the Chkalovsky military aerodrome in the Moscow region.



On board were 64 members of the Alexandrov Ensemble – the army’s official musical group, also known as the Red Army Choir – and their conductor, Valery Khalilov.

“The ensemble has been orphaned by a third,” said the state channel Rossiya.

The choir was due to perform for Russian troops deployed in Syria during new year’s celebrations at the Hmeimim airbase, which has been used to launch airstrikes in support of Moscow’s ally, President Bashar al-Assad.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russian rescuer boats patrol off the coast of Sochi looking for debris. Photograph: Yekaterina Shtukina/AFP/Getty Images

Other passengers included military officers, journalists and Yelizaveta Glinka, a popular charity worker also known as Doctor Liza who had been flying with medical supplies for a hospital in the coastal city of Latakia.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, ordered a day of national mourning on Monday, with state television flashing black and white pictures of the victims across the screen while entertainment programmes were cancelled.

There has been little public discussion of Russia’s war in Syria, except for a simple narrative about fighting terrorism. In a carefully phrased editorial on Monday, the daily newspaper Vedomosti said the plane crash was a tragedy, but the dead were “victims of a war which we are taking part in, whether freely or not”.

“We understand the depth of this tragedy, but we do not think it should limit public discussion of whether Russia should be taking part in this war,” it said.

People brought flowers to improvised memorials at the port in central Sochi and the city’s airport, as well as to the Moscow headquarters of the Red Army Choir and the office of Fair Aid, the non-governmental organisation that Glinka headed, which primarily worked with the homeless.



Tu-154 aircraft have been involved in a number of accidents and are no longer used by commercial airlines in Russia.

But Sergei Bainetov, the air force head of flight safety, said on Sunday that the plane involved in the crash was “in good condition technically”.

In April 2010 many high-ranking Polish officials, including the then president Lech Kaczynski, were killed when a Tu-154 airliner went down in thick fog while approaching Smolensk airport in western Russia.