The Black Widows' Revenge

For three days after the planes fell from the sky, the Kremlin seemed to be in denial about the cause. Two aircraft left Tuesday night from the same Moscow airport, and dropped off the radar screens within 60 seconds of each other. At 10.53 p.m. traffic controllers lost contact with Flight 1047, a Siberia Airlines flight from Moscow to the Black Sea resort of Sochi. A minute later, Volga-Aviaexpress Flight 1303 from Moscow to Volgograd disappeared. The wreckage of the planes was quickly found. In all, at least 90 people had been killed.

The massive, near-simultaneous nature of the catastrophes was only the first clue that this was terrorism. Villagers in the Tula region, where 1303 fell, heard explosions before the crash. Siberia Airlines said 1047 had put out a "hijack alarm" as it went down. To a country that has become used to terror attacks large and small, the culprits seemed obvious: the Chechens again. Elections for Chechnya's President — replacing Akhmad Kadyrov, blown up last May — were due in a few days, and had been denounced by the rebels as a farce. Chechen guerrillas had demonstrated their power by occupying parts of the republic's capital, Grozny, a few days earlier.

The Kremlin did not see it that way. "There are no signs of terrorism," the chief spokesman of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Sergei Ignatchenko, insisted last Wednesday. Transport Minister Igor Levitin dismissed the idea that the tragedies might be linked. "They belong to different air companies, and were flying to different locations," he told journalists. Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin appeared on state TV, discussing the harvest and the new school year.

By Friday, the official line was unraveling. The FSB soon confirmed what Russian security experts had suspected from the start — a powerful explosive, hexogen, had been found in the wreckage of both planes. As little as 400 g of the explosive powder would be enough to bring down a plane, says Adolf Mishuyev, an explosives expert who is involved in the crash investigation.