Angry Relatives Visit Black Sea Crash Site 

Reuters  

KIEV – Ukraine’s military on Monday clung to its denial that a rogue missile blew up a Russian airliner last Thursday, killing 78, as angry and grieving relatives visited the Black Sea crash site.  

But President Leonid Kuchma, facing pressure from Russia to disclose more about the missile exercises on the Crimean Peninsula last week, appeared to stop short of ruling out a Ukrainian missile wildly off course as the cause of the disaster. 

Technically it is impossible, but then poetically everything is possible,” Mr. Kuchma said. “Following a catastrophe all theories should be discussed, but only by experts.”  

The Ukraine Defense Ministry insisted for the fifth consecutive day that it had not caused the midair explosion, but it backtracked on previous statements about the flight zone used in the tests.  

Speculation as to the cause of the crash of the Siberia Airlines plane has increasingly turned to a missile shot, after U.S. officials said spy satellite data showed a missile plume near the crash area. 

Russian investigators said they had found debris at the wreck site that could not have come from the Tupelov 154 jet, which was flying from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk in Siberia.  

But the man in charge of the missile launches, Lieutenant General Volodymyr Tkachyov, said Monday that a fresh review of launching data showed that his troops were not at fault.  

General Tkachyov displayed military maps and video footage of long-range S200 missiles, designed to knock planes out of the sky, being launched from the Crimean coast. 

He said one S-200 had been fired at the time of the plane crash and that it landed in the Black Sea about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the shore, while the plane crashed about 270 kilometers away.  

The Defense Ministry had previously said that all 23 missiles fired had remained within a 40-kilometer radius from the launching site. General Tkachyov gave no reason for the discrepancy and declined to say how many of the missiles launched were S-200s.  

The controversy comes 18 months after Ukraine’s Defense Ministry spent days denying that a rogue missile had blown up an apartment block in the town of Brovary, killing four. It admitted responsibility only when rescue workers found a piece of the missile in the ruins.  

There have been few concrete clues in the Russian inquiry so far, and the black box flight recorders remain more than 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) below the surface. Air traffic controllers heard a short scream from the cockpit just as the plane disappeared from radar screens. 

Bereaved relatives arrived in the Russian Black Sea port of Sochi late Sunday on a special flight from Tel Aviv.  

“Whoever is guilty should be made to pay for this,” said Lesya Sirovsky, 27. “I think it’s because of this missile, and so do all the other relatives.”  

A group of 46 relatives left the port of Sochi early Monday for the six-hour voyage to the crash site.