Russia asked Israel and the US yesterday for help unravelling the mystery explosion and crash of an airliner carrying up to 78 people while launching a criminal probe into possible terrorism.
Vladimir Rushailo, Russia's Security Council chief and head of a commission looking into the crash, said help would be needed to raise the black box flight recorder which experts say lies around 1km under the Black Sea.
"We want to make requests to colleagues in the United States and Israel, and other countries who have experience at working at such depth, to help us investigate whether it is possible to lift the black box," he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has already said Israel will cooperate fully with Russia's investigations. The plane, most of whose passengers were Russian-born Israelis, plunged into the sea while flying from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk in Siberia.
Leading theories for the disaster include a bomb blast, a catastrophic technical fault on the Tupolev-154 or an accidental strike by a missile from a Ukrainian military exercise in progress at the time. Ukraine has denied it was responsible.
Records of the last conversations between the crew and the control tower could be a key piece of evidence for teams trying to explain the mid-air explosion of the Sibir Airlines plane.
At the crash site, 185km off the Black Sea resort of Sochi, workers lifted corpses from the water. Debris floated across the sea.
The chief prosecutor's office said yesterday that Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov had launched a probe under Article 205 of the criminal code, used to deal with terrorism. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday the crash might be a "terrorist act," but later called on the media not to "sensationalize" the disaster.
Ukraine insisted again yesterday it had not shot down the plane.
Ukrainian forces were test-firing surface-to-air missiles from the Crimean peninsula at the time of the accident.
A US official said in Washington there was "every indication" a Ukrainian missile was to blame. US officials said a spy satellite had detected a missile's rocket plume.
But a Ukraine defense ministry spokesman said that "The tragedy with the aircraft occurred 250km from the area where the exercises were taking place."
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