President Vladimir Putin ordered the FSB security service to investigate the incidents - a clear indication of suspicious circumstances. Witnesses on the ground saw an explosion on board the second plane just before it crashed near Tula, 90 miles south of Moscow. "Around 11 pm, there was a strange noise in the sky, then a torn-up book fell onto our garage," a local man told NTV Television, holding up the book with its tattered pages.
Security was tightened at all Russian airports after the incidents. An aviation source said that since both planes took off from the same airport and disappeared from radars around the same time the action was likely to have been planned. "In such circumstances one cannot exclude a terrorist act." The same source added that FSB and police experts were working in Domodedovo airport - where both planes took off - to discover whether all passengers had undergone proper security checks.
The incidents came just days before a presidential election in Chechnya where Moscow has been battling separatist rebels for a decade. The rebels launched a major raid in the local capital Grozny last week and promised more attacks. The plane that crashed near Tula was a Tu-134 airliner with 35 passengers and seven to nine crew on board. The airline said the plane was in good shape and its passengers had undergone all necessary security checks. There were no survivors since it fell from a height of 30,000 feet.
Just three minutes after the Tu-134 crashed, air traffic controllers lost contact with the other passenger plane, a Tu-154 bound for Sochi, a Black Sea resort. Its wreckage was not found until the next day, as the search was disrupted by heavy rain. The Russian airline Sibir, owners of the plane, said that 46 people, including 8 crewmembers, were on board. No foreigners were on either plane.
