Russian Jet Explodes Over Black Sea; 76 Die

A Russian passenger jet flying from Israel to Siberia burst into a fireball high over the Black Sea on Thursday, killing the 76 people on board and raising fears that it could be the latest target of a terrorist attack.

U.S. officials suggested, however, that the airliner was shot down by an errant surface-to-air missile fired by Ukrainian forces during military exercises taking place more than 200 miles away. Ukrainian officials denied the possibility.

Pilots aboard the Siberian Airlines charter flight gave no warning of malfunction or mishap aboard the craft before it disappeared from radar screens at 1:44 p.m., Russian aviation officials said. The pilots had last spoken to air traffic controllers during a routine check five minutes earlier.

The pilot of an Armenian airliner passing nearby saw a flash of light and watched as the plane fell toward the sea at least 30,000 feet below, trailing a red plume and raining debris. It exploded a second time upon impact, he said.

The Ukrainian armed forces were conducting exercises at the time that involved surface-to-air missiles, but Ukrainian and Russian officials insisted that the airliner was out of range of the weapons. Other scenarios included a bomb or catastrophic mechanical failure such as the one that downed TWA Flight 800 off New York in 1996.

“[Military] exercises were being held in the area adjacent to that territory at that time,” Russian President Vladimir V. Putin said late Thursday. “However, first of all, all appropriate [aviation] services had been notified. And second, the weapons that were being used during the exercises, according to their tactical and technical parameters, could not have reached the air corridor in which our aircraft--the Tu-154--was located.”

Putin said Russian naval officers were observing the Ukrainian exercises and “we have no reason to disbelieve either them or the Ukrainian military.”

Initially, Putin and other top officials--on high alert since hijacked passenger planes were rammed into targets in New York and near Washington last month--had suggested that the most likely cause was terrorism.

“Naturally, one of the versions that we are working on is a terrorist act,” said Alexander A. Zdanovich, spokesman for the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet KGB.

Israeli airport officials, known for their tight security, expressed disbelief that someone might have secreted a bomb on board at Ben Gurion International Airport.

Pini Schiff, spokesman for the Israeli Airport Authority, said the flight, its passengers and cargo underwent the same stringent security measures applied to all flights leaving the airport near Tel Aviv, including rigorous questioning of passengers, background checks and repeated inspection of luggage.

The chances of a bomb having been placed on the plane in the Israeli airport “are very poor,” Schiff said. “Close to zero.”

Siberian Airlines Flight 1812 was a regularly scheduled charter that flew once a week between Tel Aviv and Novosibirsk, a Siberian city about 1,800 miles east of Moscow. Schiff said it took off on time at 9:58 a.m.

“It left without harm, it flew for four hours and then we lost contact,” he said. “The passengers were checked, there was nothing suspicious, everything went according to schedule.”

Officials from Siberian Airlines, Russia’s third-largest carrier, expressed disbelief that a massive technical failure might have caused the explosion.

“I still think it was a terrorist act. It was one of Siberian Airlines’ best aircraft, and it was flown by the best pilots,” said Natalya Filyova, deputy director-general of the carrier.

The plane exploded about 120 miles southwest of the Russian coastal resort of Sochi. Russian rescuers who reached the site shortly after the explosion found a long oil slick littered with small pieces of debris. By this morning, they had retrieved 13 bodies; they did not expect to find any of the 64 passengers or 12 crew members alive.

The sea is more than 3,000 feet deep at the site, a fact that is likely to hamper salvage efforts and make the investigation more difficult.

In Washington, Pentagon officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said they believed the plane may have been downed by a surface-to-air missile fired during naval exercises along the coast of Crimea, about 240 miles from the crash site. They suggested that the jet may have been struck by an S-200, a land-based surface-to-air missile with a radar guidance system.

Igor Khalyavinsky, spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, said that scenario was impossible. He insisted that the missiles fired during the exercises had a maximum range of about 25 miles and were targeted no higher than 700 feet, and that all missiles hit their intended targets. He also said all the missiles were designed to self-destruct if they strayed from their intended trajectory.

“There is absolutely no basis for implicating Ukrainian air defense forces for any sort of involvement in this tragic event,” Ukrainian President Leonid D. Kuchma said in a phone call to Putin late Thursday, according to a Kremlin spokesman.

Dispute Over Types of Missiles Being Used

However, two naval officers contacted by The Times--Nikolai Savchenko, chief spokesman for the Ukrainian navy, and Adm. Vladimir Komoyedov, commander of Russia’s Black Sea fleet--confirmed that S-200 and S-300 missiles were fired during the exercises.

They said the missiles were fired from Russia’s Opuk naval firing range, a facility operated by the Russian navy on Ukrainian territory near the city of Kerch. The S-200 has a range of about 200 miles and the S-300 more than 400 miles. Both can hit targets well above the airliner’s altitude, which various officials said was somewhere between 30,000 and 36,000 feet at the time of the explosion.

However, Komoyedov insisted that the versions of the missiles fired Thursday had shorter ranges, no greater than 135 miles, and he was confident of their navigation because Russian officers at Opuk controlled the tracking telemetry.

He said it was impossible to verify that every missile hit its target, but added that he was convinced that none could have struck the airliner.

“There were very many missiles fired today,” he said from his home at the Russian naval base in Sevastopol. “It is impossible to say that everything did hit the target or something did not hit the target. It does not work that way at exercises.”

Putin named his top security aide, Security Council Chairman Vladimir B. Rushailo, to head an investigative commission to determine the cause of the disaster. The Russian president discussed the incident by telephone late Thursday with President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

In Novosibirsk, relatives arriving to meet the flight were overcome with grief. Russian television reports showed groups of men sobbing and overwrought women being injected with sedatives.

“My father. My father was supposed to be on the flight,” said one leather-jacketed man. “I just learned about it on the radio,” he choked before turning away to cry.

Among the passengers were Russians who had been visiting their children living in Israel. Others were Russians who had become Israeli citizens, heading to their native land for a vacation during this Jewish holiday season of Sukkot.

‘A Terrible Tragedy for All of Us’

The passengers included 10 people with connections to the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental organization that promotes immigration to Israel; one-sixth of Israel’s population is immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

“What happened to the Tel Aviv-Novosibirsk flight is a tragedy, a terrible tragedy for all of us. It is a blow that has literally knocked us down on the ground,” Rabbi Itskhak Berezin, chief rabbi of Novosibirsk, said by telephone. “It is impossible to say whether it was a terrorist act or an ordinary breakdown, but in either case it does not make our grief any less.”

At Ben Gurion airport, authorities set aside a reception area at the end of Terminal 2 for relatives of the passengers. A few tearful, distraught family members arrived, one by one or in pairs, and were rushed behind screens set up for privacy. Inside the area, relatives sat slumped in white and blue plastic chairs. Most watched television in stunned silence, nervously smoked cigarettes or talked quietly to military officers and counselors.

A young man in a denim shirt covered his face with his hands in anguish: His wife and baby son were on the plane. One redheaded woman in her early 40s from Novosibirsk walked quickly out of the terminal. She had come to learn the fate of her 19-year-old niece.

“Let’s hope we live through this, and then we’ll see,” she said. “They just told us they knew she was on the plane.”

Fearing terrorism, the airport authority shut down operations, grounding all outbound flights for nearly five hours. An estimated 4,000 passengers from 19 flights were stranded at the airport, camped out in lounges and on the front lawn.

One passenger, Georgette Erez of the Tel Aviv suburb of Kiryat Gad, said she and the 18 co-workers she was traveling with would take events in stride.

“From the beginning of the history of the Israeli people, we know we risk our lives. We know no other way,” said the 42-year-old manager of an employment agency bound, she hoped, for Budapest, Hungary’s capital. As for the vaunted security at the Israeli airport, Erez said trust goes only so far.

“We stopped saying that it would never happen here,” she said. “We knew it would happen to us someday.”

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Reynolds reported from Moscow and Wilkinson from Tel Aviv. Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington and Alexei Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.