Former SBU chief has not ruled out an explosion aboard the Tu-154
The former Chief of the Security Service of Ukraine, Yevhen Marchuk suggested that there was an explosion aboard the Tu-154 that crashed near Sochi. Marchuk posted this conclusion on Facebook.
“If contact with crew was lost simultaneously with the disappearance of the aircraft from radar, it could mean that the entire crew was instantly and simultaneously killed. And this could mean that an explosion took place in or near the nose of the aircraft and the entire crew was suddenly killed or that the Tu-154 suddenly fell apart and depressurized due to some other reasons,” Marchuk wrote.
He added that if an aircraft collapses due to technical reasons, as a rule, this begins not from the nose part of the aircraft and the crew has seconds to report on an accident. Marchuk said that black boxes can be easily found because they send pulse signals for 30 days and the corresponding search devices see and hear them even from sea depths of up to 1 kilometer. The sea depth at the scene of the crash was a mere 70 meters.
“Russians will quickly find the so-called black boxes (in fact they are red). The first of these black boxes records all crew conversation and the second records a large number of technical parameters of the aircraft throughout the flight. Will Russians report on true cause of the crash? We will see,” Marchuk wrote.
The Council of Federation and the State Duma of the Russian Federation stated that the possibility of a terrorist attack aboard the Tu-154 that crashed near Sochi has been ruled out.
The representatives of Defense Committees of two chambers of the Parliament, Viktor Ozerov and Andrei Krasov explain this by the fact that the aircraft belonged to the Ministry of Defense and was secure property. They urged everyone to wait for conclusions of the Special Commission, which is engaged in investigation of causes of aircraft crash, Radio Svoboda reported.
The Tu-154 in question disappeared from radar screens shortly after take-off on December 25 at 05:40 local time from Adler on its way to the Russian Hmeymin airbase near the Syrian city of Latakia. Eight crew members and 84 passengers, including the musicians of an ensemble named after Alexandrov and nine Russian journalists were aboard.
The member of the Council on Development of Civil Society and Human Rights under the auspices of the President of the Russian Federation, the Head of the charity fund Spravedlivaya Pomoshch (Fair Assistance), Elizaveta Glinka, also known as Dr. Liza was among passengers of the aircraft.
A New Year’s concert was planned to be held at a Russian military base in Syria. Later, it became known that fragments of aircraft were found 1.5 kilometers away from coast of Sochi in the Black Sea. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, 10 bodies of the victims were already taken aboard a rescue boat. Search and rescue operations are still ongoing.