GERMANY: Prosecutors in the southern German city of Constance yesterday launched a criminal inquiry to establish if errors contributed to the deaths of 71 people in Monday's mid-air plane crash over the town of Überlingen.
A spokesman said the inquiry was a routine step and that the prosecutor's office would be waiting for the official report by German accident investigators before taking action.
Meanwhile, relatives of the 69 Russians killed in the collision arrived in Germany to visit the crash site. Mothers in black wept, clutching flowers and holding each other for support while ashen-faced fathers and brothers laid wreaths at the mangled wreck of the Tupolev plane.
The 140-strong group from the Russian republic of Bashkortostan was kept shielded from the media at all times and stayed 45 minutes at the crash scene.
Several relatives broke down and were brought to a nearby hospital. The others returned to Überlingen on Lake Constance, accompanied by doctors, psychologists and a Russian orthodox priest.
"I only want to bring something back home, to have something to bury my child with," said Ms Alfiya Khanannova, mother of one young victim.
In Überlingen parents began the difficult task of helping to identify their children, handing over photographs and, in some cases, even dental records.
Although investigators have uncovered 68 of the 71 people killed in the accident, they have only been able to positively identify the two pilots of the DHL plane.
The bodies from the Tupolev are in such a poor condition that investigators intend to let relatives see them only as a last resort to aid identification.
Pressure continues to build on Skyguide, the Swiss air traffic control authority in charge of the airspace where the collision occurred.
An unnamed investigator at the crash scene told a Russian news agency yesterday that the pilot of the Russian jet informed Skyguide first of the looming collision, not the other way round.
The RIA news agency said the Tupolev pilot requested permission to decrease altitude 90 seconds before the collision, but that an answer came only 44 seconds before impact. The Tupolev began to descend 30 seconds before the crash followed by the Boeing 16 seconds later, apparently steered by its anti-collision computer.
However, Germany's Federal Office for Flight Accident Investigation (BFU) said no one had any way of knowing such detailed information at this stage. Investigators began listening to voice-recorders yesterday, but said they were in a poor condition.
German authorities said that at the time of the collision, the single air-traffic controller on duty was monitoring five different planes on two different screens. At the time of the crash he was correcting the path of a plane about to land at nearby Friedrichshafen airport.
Skyguide dismissed the Russian allegations, as well as safety warnings in a report issued last month from the Swiss aviation safety body BFU. The report said the Skyguide radar system updated flight positions every 12 seconds, which did not conform to the EU standard of eight seconds.
"The blunt essence is that Skyguide's radar equipment can show planes in the wrong position and screens from which planes suddenly vanish. Has our air safety become rather sloppy?" asked Swiss tabloid Blick. A Skyguide spokesman has already admitted that its automatic warning system was operating in a limited mode and that only one of two staff members was on duty when the collision occurred.
