Plane crashes 'not terrorism'

A spokesman for Russia's Federal Security Service says studies of wreckage have determined there was no terrorist attack on two planes that crashed almost simultaneously killing 88 people.

The two flights disappeared off radar screens within a minute of each other after both had taken off from Moscow's Domodedovo airport.

Witnesses spoke of an explosion immediately before the first plane crashed while the second flight was said to have sent out a hijack alert seconds before it fell from the sky.

A total of 88 passengers and crew are understood to have died after rescue workers confirmed there had been no survivors.

President Vladimir Putin immediately put the country on full alert, tightened airport security and ordered the FSB - the successor to the KGB - to launch an investigation. Today agents were combing passenger lists for known terrorists and interviewing ground crew involved in both flights.

The first jet to crash was a Volga-Aviaexpress Tupolev-134 scheduled domestic flight from Moscow to Volgograd, in the south of the country. It had 34 passengers and eight crew and disappeared at about 23.00 Moscow time (8pm British time) last night.

The plane had nearly reached its cruising height of 30,000 feet. Its burning tail wing was later found near the village of Buchalki, 110 miles south of the capital.

Witnesses on the ground saw an explosion just before it crashed. "Around 11pm, there was a strange noise in the sky, then this book fell onto our garage," a local man told NTV television, holding up the tattered book. Rescuers found the Tu-134 jet's wreckage in a field, broken into two parts. It is understood it was being piloted by the director of Volga-Aviaexpress.

One minute after the first crash, a scheduled Tupolev-154 with 46 on board, including eight crew, was reported missing near the southern city of Rostov-on-Don during a flight from Moscow to the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

The search for survivors was hampered by bad weather but early today rescuers found wreckage and body parts from the second, Sibir Airlines, plane, at the village of Gluboky, in the Kaminsk-Shakhtinsky region.

It is understood the planes had taken off within 40 minutes of each other and air traffic controllers at Domodedovo said that both flights were lost from radar screens within a minute of each other.

Early today search teams found black box flight recorders from both planes.

Domodedovo airport is used by British Airways and a number of other Western airlines and operates Westernstyle security checks.

BA operates two flights a day to Moscow, while Russian airline Transaero also flies to Gatwick daily from the airport.

Putin ordered the FSB to investigate both incidents "without delay", amid fears that Chechen terrorists or al Qaeda may be behind the attacks.

An air traffic control source told the ITAR-TASS news agency that the possibility of a terrorist attack could not be ruled out. "The fact that both planes took off from one airport and disappeared from radars around the same time could show it was a planned action," Interfax quoted an aviation source as saying.

Moderate Chechen separatists denied any involvement in the crashes.

"Our government has nothing to do with terrorist attacks," said one Chechen separatist.