2001 Grozny Mi-8 crash

Infobox Airliner accident
name=2005 Grozny Mi-8 crash
Date=October 17 2001
Type=Missile
Site=Grozny, Chechnya
Fatalities=13
Injuries=
Aircraft Type=Mil Mi-8
Operator=Russian Armed Forces
Tail Number=
Passengers=10
Crew=3
Survivors=

The 2001 Russian military Mil Mi-8 crash in Chechnya killed 13 Russian military men, mostly senior military officers including two generals.

On October 17 2001, a surface-to-air missile shot down a VIP Mil Mi-8 helicopter over Grozny by a special Chechen group targeting Russian commanders, killing Major-General Anatoly Pozdnyakov, member of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Major-General Pavel Varfolomeyev, deputy director of staff of the Defence Ministry of Russia, eight Colonels (Igor Abramov, Igor Khakhalkin, Yuri Makhov, Vladimir Smolennikov, Sergei Toryanik, Nikolai Lyubimsky, Igor Tribuntsov and Vladimir Talayev), and three crewmembers. [ [http://www.gazeta.ru/2003/03/12/Chechengangt.shtml Chechen gang targeting generals eliminated] ]

According to the other version, put forward by Anna Politkovskaya, the helicopter was downed by the corrupt Russian forces. [ [http://www.amina.com/article/correv.html The corrosive evil of the Chechen conflict] ] According to Politkovskaya:

The city was sealed off after a series of strange events there. Controls were so tight you couldn’t even move between different districts within the city, let alone make your way out of Grozny on foot. On that day, 17 September, a helicopter carrying a commission, headed by Major-General Anatoly Pozdnyakov, from the General Staff in Moscow was shot down directly over the city. The general was engaged in work quite unprecedented for a soldier in Chechnya. Only an hour before the helicopter was shot down, he told me the task of his commission was to gather data on crimes committed by the military, analyse their findings, put them in some order and then submit the information for the president’s consideration. Nothing of the kind had been done before. The helicopter in which they were flying out of Grozny was shot down almost exactly over the city centre. All the members of the commission perished, and since they were already on their way to Khankala airbase to take a plane back to Moscow, so did all the material they had collected. [ [http://www.indexonline.org/en/news/articles/2007/3/russia-anna-politkovskaya-one-year-on.shtml Anna Politkovskaya : 1958-2006] ]

References

External links

* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E7D6153AF93BA15752C0A9649C8B63 Russian Officers Are Killed in Helicopter Crash in Chechnya]
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1785257.stm Top Russians die in Chechnya crash]