Sibir Crash - 10.04.2001

 

Jerusalem Post (November 6)
Kyiv Post (October 31)
Moscow Times (October 8)
JTA (October 7)
Ha'aretz (October 5)

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The Jerusalem Post

Leaders mourn immigrant air crash victims

November, 06 2001

By Tovah Lazaroff

JERUSALEM (November 6) - Memorial flames flickered on a dark stage last night as government officials and Russian immigrants gathered to honor the 78 victims of Sibir Airlines Flight 1812, shot down by an errant Ukrainian Army missile into the Black Sea en route from Israel to Siberia on October 4.

"Our hearts are with you," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the audience of more than 1,000, mostly Russian immigrants, who filled the Jerusalem International Convention Center. The event was sponsored by the Jewish Agency, the Immigration Absorption Ministry, and the Government Information Center.

Before the ceremony, Sharon and Deputy Absorption Minister Yuli Edelstein met with relatives of the victims and informed them that each family would receive NIS 10,000 raised through private donations. The money will be distributed by Shuvu, a non-profit organization that works with immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

"Thirty-one days have passed since this tragedy," Jewish Agency Chairman Sallai Meridor told the gathering. "But there is no end to the moments of pain."

It is the images of people that stick in his mind the most, Sharon said: "Children with laughter in their eyes. Young mothers, husbands, and grandparents. Behind each picture is a story of a world of hope," he said.

Meridor said he vividly remembered when the families of the missing returned from Russia. "I remember that night in the airport - how the families returned, some with caskets and some without, some crying and some silent," he said.

The tragedy presents Israelis with an important opportunity to learn about Russian immigrants and to reach out to that community, Sharon said. Of those who died, 41 were Israeli and another 19 had relatives in this country.

Sharon and other officials, including President Moshe Katsav, also used the event to pay tribute to the waves of immigrants who have helped to build the country.

"Our world would be a narrow place without them," Sharon said. The Russian community has made vast contributions to Israel in the areas of culture, science, politics, and academia, he said.

The tragedy was made worse by the fact the majority of its victims were immigrants who had already endured anti-Semitism in their own country and overcome hardships associated with settling here, said Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg.

"When you immigrated we were glad," Burg said. "Israel is a country that loves immigration, but doesn't always know how to love the immigrants."

The victims of Flight 1812 had made the difficult journey out of Russia and then worked hard to build a home in a country that is not always so friendly to immigrants, Burg said.

"They were returning with a new hope and a new future, and suddenly in the middle of the journey, they died," Burg said.

After the event, Russian immigrant Konstantin Kravchinsky of Hadera said he was glad to hear top Israeli officials speak positively about Russian immigrants.

It's like "we are regular citizens," he said. Maybe it is the start of new relations between Israelis and Russian immigrants, he said.

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The Kyiv Post

Ukraine plans computer simulation of missile shooting down Russian plane

KYIV, Oct. 31 - (AP) Ukrainian prosecutors and military officials will conduct a simulation Thursday of the crash of a Russian passenger jet downed by a Ukrainian missile to study how the accident happened, Ukraine's security chief said Wednesday.

The Sibir Airlines Tu-154 crashed into the Black Sea on Oct. 4 on its way from Israel to Novosibirsk, Russia, killing all 78 people aboard. It was hit by a missile fired during exercises by Ukraine's navy on the Crimean peninsula.

In Thursday's experiment, a real Tu-154 will fly the same route and be monitored by Ukraine's air defense system, and the shooting will be simulated on a computer, Ukrainian Security Council chief Yevhen Marchuk was quoted by the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news agencies as saying.

No real missiles will be involved. Members of the Russian investigating commission will join Ukrainian investigators in observing the operation, the reports said.

The situation will be recreated «with split-second precision,» Marchuk was quoted as saying. «Not everything that happened on October 4th is clear to the Ukrainian side,» he said.

Still, he said the Ukrainian side of the investigation was «at the finishing stage.»

Following the crash, Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma fired Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk and his aides. Kuchma ordered a check of all Ukrainian missiles, banned missile launches until the investigation ends and promised compensation to the victims' families. Most of the passengers were recent Russian emigrants to Israel.

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The Moscow Times

Kremlin Looks to Kiev for Crash Clues  

By Ana Uzelac
Staff Writer

SOCHI, Southern Russia (Oct. 8) -- With the Kremlin now ready to consider the possibility that a Russian passenger plane was shot down by a stray Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile, investigators on Sunday looked through the piles of debris that have been brought ashore and a vessel searched the bottom of the Black Sea for evidence.

A Sibir Tu-154 airliner flying Thursday afternoon from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk exploded over the Black Sea, some 180 kilometers off the coast of Sochi, killing all 78 people aboard. Most of the passengers were Israeli citizens with Russian roots who were on their way to visit relatives.

A 21-member Israeli delegation arrived Sunday in Sochi to help identify the 14 bodies that were recovered by a Russian freighter. Eight have been identified, officials said.

Ukraine's military has denied that a missile fired during an air-defense exercise on the Black Sea coast downed the plane, saying it did not have sufficient range.

But President Vladimir Putin was not satisfied with the documentation on the exercises that Ukraine has provided so far, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Saturday. Putin had demanded more information about the firing of an S-200 missile at 1:41 p.m. Moscow time, three minutes before the Sibir plane disappeared from radar screens, Ivanov said on RTR television.

"All versions of what happened are being examined, including the possible link between the plane crash and the air defense exercises held by the Ukrainian armed forces," Ivanov said.

Just hours after the crash, unnamed U.S. defense officials in Washington said that data from an early-warning missile tracking system showed the plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile.

Putin initially said he had no reason to doubt Ukraine's denial. Ivanov said the "so-called version" of a stray rocket was "launched by the media." A terrorist attack or malfunction of the aircraft were given as more likely possibilities Thursday.

But at a press conference Saturday in Sochi, Security Council head Vladimir Rushailo confirmed the plane was "hit by an explosion," although he would not elaborate on what kind of explosion. He said investigators have found "foreign objects" among the airplane debris, but said these might be anything, including the passengers' personal belongings.

The Associated Press said officials involved in the salvage effort described finding a large floating cylindrical object that they could not identify.

Fragments of the plane that were found floating in the sea -- broken seats, soaked cushions, a wheel, unrecognizable pieces of metal, even some personal belongings -- were piled in a small hangar at Sochi's airport. Many had small, round holes in them.

The largest fragment -- a piece of bent metal just more than a meter high -- had a big jagged hole in the middle, much like a shrapnel hole.

The New York Times quoted an unidentified official at the Severny Zavod missile factory saying that S-200s shoot down aircraft by blasting them with shrapnel. It is not unusual for the body of the missile to survive the attack, the official said.

The bodies that were retrieved had numerous wounds caused by objects that had gone right through them, said Rushailo, who is heading the commission investigating the tragedy.

The last sound Russian air traffic controllers heard from the cockpit of the Tu-154 was of a pilot's scream, said Alexander Neradko, first deputy transportation minister. "It was not a word, but a scream. It was very short. It only lasted half a second," he said at a news conference Sunday.

The plane's black boxes remain on the bottom of the Black Sea at a depth of more than 2,000 meters. Tatyana Anodina, a member of the special commission, said they were not emitting any radio signals that would make them easier to find.

The search for the black boxes was further hampered by the fact that the silt at the bottom of the Black Sea is six meters deep, Interfax reported, citing Deputy Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Moskalets.

The bottom of the sea was being searched by an unmanned deep-sea vessel, Triton, which belongs to the scientific research ship Alexander Galitsyn, currently deployed at the place of the crash. But the results were hardly encouraging: Triton managed to search only 30 square kilometers Sunday, less than 10 percent of the area where the debris may lie and which is estimated at some 300 square kilometers.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry was sending a delegation to Sochi on Monday to help with the investigation.

On April 20, 2000, a Ukrainian surface-to-surface Tochka-U missile fired during a training exercise veered off course and hit an apartment building in the town of Bovary. Three people were killed and five were injured. The military took several days to admit that the explosion at the apartment building was caused by its missile.

Meanwhile, relatives of passengers on the Sibir flight were arriving in Sochi. The first plane carrying family members from Israel arrived Sunday evening.

"They really don't know what to do, how to behave," said Rabbi Berl Lazar, one of Russia's chief rabbis, who also came to Sochi. "They don't want anything, they just ask what should they do."

The Sochi city administration is offering to take relatives by boat on Monday morning to the place where the plane crashed.

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Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Israeli families and crash experts
fly to Russia following plane disaster

By Jessica Steinberg

JERUSALEM, Oct. 7 (JTA) — Dozens of Israelis have flown to Russia for the grim task of helping identify the remains of relatives who died last week when a Russian airliner exploded in mid-air over the Black Sea.

In addition, Israeli experts arrived Sunday in Sochi, Russia — the site near the Black Sea where the crash investigation is taking place — to help probe the Oct. 4 crash of a Sibir Airlines flight. The 35-member delegation also included a group from the army rabbinate to ensure that victims' remains are dealt with according to Jewish law.

"Our aim is to help those who need our help," Lt.-Col. Shimon Dahan, deputy head of the Israeli team, told Reuters. "The delegation consists above all of police who specialize in the identification of bodies."

Russian officials initially said the incident probably was a terrorist act, but later appeared more open to the U.S. contention that Ukraine mistakenly shot down the plane during a military exercise.

The U.S. theory gained credence after debris was found at the crash site that could not have come from the plane.

Ukraine initially denied that its forces had shot down the plane. But Ukrainian Prime Minister Anatoly Kinakh later appeared to retreat from those denials, saying the missile theory "had a right to exist."

As some relatives were being flown to Russia on Sunday, others who had already arrived were taken to a morgue for the grim task of identifying bodies — some of which had been burned beyond recognition.

An estimated 78 people were on the plane, many of them Russian-born Israeli citizens going to visit family and friends in Siberia.

The plane was en route from Israel to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, which has one of Russia's largest Jewish communities and is a major center for aliyah to Israel.

Novosibirsk is known as the scientific capital of Siberia. There are more than 50 research institutions in the city, which has 13 universities for a population of 2.5 million people.

In addition to helping identifying the victims, the relatives were flying to Sochi to try to gain some form of closure, said Chaim Chesler, treasurer of the Jewish Agency for Israel, which sponsored the relatives' flights.

"We want to help the relatives as much as we can," said Chesler, who was formerly the head of Jewish Agency operations in the former Soviet Union. "We're taking the same route" the downed airliner took.

Since the beginning of the year, 620 Jews have made aliyah from Siberia, 78 of them from Novosibirsk.

In 2000, 2,173 Jews immigrated to Israel from Siberia, 447 from Novosibirsk.

One victim, Adi Kameri, 25, was a native Israeli who was going to visit her mother, Aliza, the Jewish Agency's emissary in Novosibirsk.

Another victim was Natalia Simanin, 22, who was flying to Novosibirsk for her wedding.

There were fathers flying with their children, and mothers with their infants.

Five of the victims were relatives of five 19-year-olds participating in the Jewish Agency's Sela program, which hosts Russian teen-agers who come to Israel before their parents.

Siberian representatives of two international Jewish organizations were among the dead: Lyudmila Ashkukova served as the Jewish Agency's coordinator in Novosibirsk, and Valery Chaeifez was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's coordinator in nearby Sosnovoborsk.

With around 15,000 Jews living in Novosibirsk, and another 90,000 in the greater Siberia region, the plane crash will affect many families, Jewish Agency spokesman Michael Jankelowitz said.

The agency plans to set up a 24-hour help center in Sochi to offer counseling and other support to victims' relatives.

"The fact that there's a direct flight once a week from Novosibirsk shows a strong connection between the Jewish community there and Israel," Jankelowitz said. "The plane that crashed was the weekly flight."

(JTA intern Amy Sara Clark contributed to this report.)

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Ha'aretz (October 5)

Air crash claims 76, most of them Israelis 

A Sibir Airlines plane that left Ben-Gurion Airport with 76 people en route to Siberia exploded over the Black Sea yesterday, raising immediate fears of a new airborne terrorist attack.

But a U.S. defense official said a missile fired during a Ukrainian military exercise had apparently brought down the plane by accident. It was an assertion Ukrainian defense officials immediately and heatedly denied and Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was not ruling out terrorism.

Two IDF Hercules transport planes were on their way to the Black Sea with navy rescue teams aboard to help in the search for bodies. By last night, 13 bodies had been recovered by Russian rescue squads.

The 10-year-old Tupelov 154 took off at 9:58 A.M. on what appeared to be another one of its routine weekly flight to Novosibirsk. Most of the passengers were Israelis - new immigrants on their way to visit relatives - or Russians on their way home from visiting Israel. Over the Black Sea, about 185 km from the sea's eastern coastal town of Sochi, the plane exploded.

At first there was fear of a terrorist attack and speculation about a faulty airplane. Putin's first reaction was to say that Russia suspected terrorism. Ben-Gurion Airport went on high alert, halting all outgoing flights for several hours as security teams rechecked all baggage.

But then U.S. defense department sources identified the cause of the explosion as a missile fired during joint Russian-Ukrainian military exercises, apparently basing their report on U.S. satellites monitoring missile launches worldwide.

Officials in Kiev, however, vehemently denied the U.S. reports, and Putin said he had no reason to doubt the Ukrainian denial. But he offered no independent proof, though he said the Russian authorities would conduct a thorough investigation.

He spoke with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, exchanging condolences and accepting Israel's request to send navy rescue and search experts.

The Ukrainians said they had tracked every missile fired during their exercise and all were accounted for. They added that the missiles fired during the exercises were not aimed in the direction of the airliner.

Other Russian officials said that terrorism was the main focus of the investigation. Russian television, citing unofficial sources, said Sibir Airlines had boosted security measures on Monday following an indication picked up by Russian security services that terrorists might target it. There was no independent confirmation of the report.

But a U.S. Defense Department official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, insisted that it was a long-range SA-2000 anti-aircraft missile that appeared to have hit the plane after being launched from the Crimean region. The SA-2000 can fly faster than three times the speed of sound, has a range of up to 300 kilometers and can hit targets above 30,000 meters altitude.

The military exercises were being conducted in Crimea, about 250 kilometers from the site of the crash, on territory controlled by the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

U.S. President George W. Bush said he was deeply saddened, sending his "heartfelt sympathies, and those of the American people," to the people of Israel and Russia. He did not address Putin's contention the crash may have been the work of terrorists, but a senior Bush adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. government had also not ruled out terrorism.

By Ha'aretz Staff and Agencies

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