A Russian plane with up to 78 passengers, mostly Israelis, and crew on board plunged into the Black Sea off Russia yesterday after an apparent mid-air blast which President Vladimir Putin said might be "a terrorist act."
In Washington, a US official said the aircraft might have been accidentally hit by a surface-to-air missile fired during a Ukrainian military training exercise.
Initial reports from the Pentagon were that there may have been a launch of a surface-to-air missile or missiles from the Crimea that might have brought down the plane, the official said.
An Armenian official quoted a pilot flying alongside the doomed TU-154 Sibir Airlines jet, heading from Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion airport to the Siberian town of Novosibirsk, as saying he saw flames, a blast, then fragments falling into the sea.
Against a background of international tension after the Sept. 11 attacks on the US, Putin told a meeting of European justice ministers: "A civilian aircraft crashed today and it is possible that it was the result of a terrorist act."
If it turns out the plane was blown up it would be the first such disaster since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
RSS