#8
Ukraine's Kuchma rejects resignation as missile view of downing firms

KIEV, Oct 11 (AFP) -
Ukrainian Defence Minister Olexander Kuzmuk offered to resign "immediately" after last week's Russian plane crash in the Black Sea, but President Leonid Kuchma said Thursday he had refused to accept the resignation.

The Russian Tu-154 airliner which crashed into the Black Sea a week ago killing all 76 passengers and crew is believed to have been brought down by an S-200 missile fired during a military exercise.

Kuchma told reporters that "as president and supreme commander, I am not going to get rid of my people so easily."

Kuzmuk had been the most insistent of Ukrainian officials denying his country's involvement in the plane crash, which was initially attributed to a terrorist act or a mechanical failure.

Kuchma, who had also rejected responsibility until conceding Tuesday it was "theoretically" possible a Ukrainian missile had shot down the Sibir airlines Tu-154, stressed that they should wait for the findings of the official investigation.

In Vienna, Ukrainian Prime Minister Anatoly Kinakh said he hoped the results of the probe would be published "shortly" but declined to speculate further on the outcome.

He reiterated that the crash was a tragedy for which Kiev expressed its condolences to the families of the victims.

The Sibir airliner had just left Tel Aviv and was travelling to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, carrying mainly Israeli passengers.

The head of Ukraine's Security and Defence Council, Evhen Marchuk, arrived in Sochi to inspect fragments of the plane's fuselage pulled from the sea.

He was accompanied by Russian Security Council chief Vladimir Rushailo, who heads the Russian investigating commission charged with determining the causes of the disaster.

On Tuesday a senior member of the commission revealed that experts had found tiny metal balls resembling fragments of an S-200 missile in the plane's wreckage.

And the missile theory gained further ground Thursday when the Russian daily Kommersant reported that air traffic controllers heard the pilot of the airliner shout "Where are we hit?" seconds before the place crashed into the Black Sea.

The pilot Yevgeny Garov was in radio contact with the North Caucasus ground control centre for six minutes prior to the blast that rocked the plane, and for several seconds after explosion, the paper said, quoting Vladimir Zhukov, the deputy chief of the control centre.

Garov had told ground control that the flight was proceeding normally.

Then seconds after the Tu-154 vanished from radar screens, he was heard over the maintained radio link to shout "Where are we hit?"

"Clearly Garov was asking his crew to find out exactly what damage had been caused by the explosion of the missile so he could tell ground control, but he didn't have time," Zhukov said.

Quoting unnamed experts, Kommersant said the plane had been shot down accidentally by a Ukrainian S-200 missile that exploded a few dozen metres (yards) away and not right alongside, as it is programmed to do.

If this were proved to be the case, "the passengers and crew died not in the air but when crashing into the sea," Igor Shipanov, head of the autopsy service in the morgue at Sochi, on Russia's Black Sea coast, told the daily.

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