Planes' recorders fail to aid search for causes, official says

The official said terrorism remains the top theory of what caused the crashes.
MOSCOW (AP) -- The recorders extracted from the wreckage of two planes that crashed nearly simultaneously have not revealed reliable information on the disasters' causes, a top Russian official was quoted as saying today.
Vladimir Yakovlev, the Russian president's envoy for the southern region, where one of the planes crashed, also said that the main theory about the catastrophe "all the same remains terrorism," the ITAR-Tass news agency said.
Officials have said that several possibilities were being investigated as the cause of the crashes that killed 89 people late Tuesday, including inferior fuel and human error and that they believed the planes' "black box" recorders would clarify the situation.
However, Yakovlev said that the recorders "had gone out of service already before the fall of the airliners," ITAR-Tass said.
Suspicions of terrorism
The apparent failure of the recorders to provide significant information could increase what appears to be rising suspicion among Russians that the crashes were terrorist acts.
Those suspicions are bolstered by the crashes' taking place just five days before a Kremlin-called election in warring Chechnya, whose separatist rebels are blamed in a series of suicide bombings in recent years.
Officials had expressed concern that militants might try to carry out attacks ahead of Sunday's vote.
In the absence of firm evidence, many Russian newspapers drew strong, if speculative, connections with terrorism.
"Russia now has a Sept. 11," the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta said in a headline.
Investigation
A government commission appointed to investigate traveled today to one of the crash sites, where a Tu-134 with 43 people aboard went down about 120 miles south of Moscow.
Workers ended their search work there, but were continuing to comb the other wreckage of a Tu-154 with 46 people aboard that fell to earth in southern Russia.
"There is still no clear-cut concept of what occurred, because the procedure of deciphering the data recorders will be conducted more than once," Transport Minister Igor Levitin, who heads the commission, was quoted as saying by ITAR-Tass.
Despite the lack of an official conclusion on the causes, the crashes nonetheless raised serious concerns about security at Russian airports.
On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin ordered the government to draft legislation to turn over responsibility for airport security to the Interior Ministry, which runs both the police and paramilitary forces, according to news reports.
Day of mourning
Putin also designated today as a national day of mourning.
The planes -- a Sibir airlines Tu-154 with 46 aboard and a Tu-134 with 43 passengers and crew belonging to tiny Volga-Aviaexpress airline -- disappeared from radar around 11:00 p.m. Tuesday.
The Tu-134 was headed to the southern city of Volgograd and the other plane to the Black Sea resort city of Sochi.
Both had taken off from the single terminal at Moscow's newly renovated Domodedovo airport, the Tu-154 around 9:35 p.m. and the smaller Tu-134 about 40 minutes later.
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