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Posted by Charleston Voice, 05.24.12
via Daily Mail
Can any US official furnish credible, meaningful evidence – not just words – why we should not believe the Russians?
State’s GRU military intelligence source says Russians are investigating theory crash was ‘industrial sabotage
By Will Stewart In Moscow
PUBLISHED: 11:02 EST, 24 May 2012
Spy sources in Moscow today made the astonishing claim that a US undercover operation may have sabotaged a new Russian Superjet plane that crashed in Indonesia two weeks ago.
The aircraft was on a demonstration flight aimed at securing lucrative orders when it slammed into a mountain killing all 45 passengers and crew.
‘We are investigating the theory that it was industrial sabotage,’ a GRU military intelligence source said.
The extraordinary Cold War-style claim echoes high-level allegations in Moscow that the US used powerful lasers to zap a Russian Mars probe seven months ago.
A headline to a story in Russia’s biggest newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda today read: ‘Are the Americans implicated in the Superjet crash?’
‘We know that they have special technology – that we also have – to jam signals from the ground or cause parameter readings to malfunction,’ said the unnamed intelligence official, highlighting a US military presence at Jakarta Airport from where the plane took off on May 9.
The Sukhoi Superjet 100 is the first entirely new passenger plane unveiled by Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It is designed to grab market share from Western manufacturers.
Russian officials insist investigators have established ‘that there were no technical problems until the crash’.
After the Mars probe failed, Russians space chief Vladimir Popovkin warned: ‘We don’t want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now.
‘The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out.’
He stressed: ‘The frequent failure of our space launches, which occur at a time when they are flying over the part of Earth not visible from Russia, where we do not see the spacecraft and do not receive telemetric information, are not clear to us.’
A senior navy commander also blamed the US Navy for the August 2000 Kursk nuclear submarine sinking that killed 118 seamen, since several US ships were in the vicinity of the Barents Sea exercises.