- MOSCOW (AP) -- The commission
investigating the near-simultaneous crashes of two Russian airliners last
month that killed 90 people concluded that explosions in the passenger
cabins brought the planes down, news agencies reported Wednesday.
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- Laboratory tests of the wreckage of the Sibir Tu-154
and the Volga-Aviaexpress Tu-134, in which explosive residue was found,
and information from the planes' flight data recorders proved that the
explosions occurred in the passenger cabins, Transport Minister Igor Levitin
said.
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- The Tu-154 crashed in the Rostov region in southern Russia,
while the Tu-134 crashed in the Tula region south of Moscow. Both crashed
on the night of Aug. 24 after taking off from Moscow's Domodyedovo airport.
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- Suspicion has fallen on two Chechen women whose passports
apparently were used by passengers ñ one on each plane.
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- The crashes were the first in a series of recent attacks
that have killed more than 430 people. In the other attacks, a suicide
bomber detonated explosives at a subway station on Aug. 31, killing 10.
The next day, dozens of heavily armed people took more than 1,200 hostages
at a school in southern Russia, which ended Sept. 3 in the killing of more
than 350 people, many of them children.
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