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by Sweejak » Sat Aug 29, 2009 4:07 pm
by Sweejak » Sat Aug 29, 2009 7:08 pm
by Sweejak » Mon Aug 31, 2009 12:34 pm
The crew of the Arctic Sea has made a written pledge not to speak about what happened on board the ship, reported the Russian news service life.ru
by Penguin » Mon Aug 31, 2009 3:03 pm
by Joe Hillshoist » Mon Aug 31, 2009 7:02 pm
I looked at that slideshow from the power plant you linked...Some serious carnage
by Sweejak » Tue Sep 01, 2009 2:39 am
At about 3PM yesterday, August 30th, after returning from two weeks long trip to Italian Dolomites mountains, I was sitting in front of my computer watching recently received emails. Suddenly I thought that this weekend media in Poland were too enthusiastic abut the arrival of Bielorussian military air jets to give more lustre to the annual Air Show at the Radom airfield. And that the presence here of Belarus air masters is a real provocation against NATO claims of its global military supremacy. And I began to worry whether Bielorussians guarded well their aircrafts during the night preceding the Air Show. I associated these my worries with a remembered by me information, which I received few years ago from France, that the French government finally admitted that during le Bourget gigantic Air Salon roughly 30 years ago, the exposed there, as the “hit” of Air Salon, Soviet supersonic passenger jet TU 144 was shot down by French military Mirage.
Full of bad presentiments I went to the second room, I switched on a TV, and on its screen I saw… the Belorussian SU 27 fighter gliding powerlessly to the earth, and than a huge cloud of smoke in the place of his fall. It was, the repeated over and over at TV, scene of air accident which happened 2 hours earlier, in which catastrophe lost their lives two top pilots of Belarusian Air Force, both of them in the grade of colonel. The quoted by TV eye witnesses, which saw this, silent and devoid of power of its both engines, plane gliding just over their heads, were telling that pilots maneuvered it in such a manner it flew into a narrow stretch of empty field between densely saturated, with small dwellings and hundreds of spectators of Air Show, Radom’s suburb. Both pilots died in this accident, probably due to their efforts to save life of people they saw on their trajectory they had not enough time to catapult and to save themselves.
I admit that I become scared of myself thinking up to which point I showed up to be “clairvoyant” as it concerns matters linked with “show” aviation at the “hot line” NATO-Russia (& Belarus). Below I send what I found in the Internet, concerning the “analogous” catastrophe of TU 144 during the air salon in Le Bourget in 1973. I haven’t found in internet a confirmation of the recent disclosure of French authorities, but from the message in Wikipedia one can easily infer it. As the crush, near Orly airport few years ago, of a French-British copy of TU 144, supersonic “Concorde”, my French friends are convinced that it was also a sabotage, made by American aviation companies this time.
Wikipedia :
The causes of this incident remain controversial to this day. A popular theory was that the Tu-144 was forced to avoid a French Mirage chase plane which was attempting to photograph its canards, which were very advanced for the time, and that the French and Soviet governments colluded with each other to cover up such details. The flight of the Mirage was denied in the original French report of the incident, perhaps because it was engaged in industrial espionage. More recent reports have admitted the existence of the Mirage, though not its role in the crash.
At the video below it is clearly visible that the TU 144 explodes in the air surely not due to any surcharging its structure, “avoiding” another plane, maneuver:
www.dailymotion.com/video/x2s4y_crash-d ... urget-1973
by Sweejak » Thu Sep 03, 2009 3:16 am
The mysterious saga surrounding the disappearance of the Arctic Sea cargo ship took a new twist Wednesday when an outspoken piracy expert who saw political overtones in the case fled Russia.
Mikhail Voitenko, the editor of the respected Sovfrakht Marine Bulletin web site, told The Moscow Times by telephone from Istanbul that he had been pressured into leaving.
“Some serious guys hinted to me yesterday or the day before yesterday,” Voitenko said. “They advised me to return in three or four months.”
Asked who the people were, Voitenko said simply, “Guess.”
Asked if it was because of his role in the Arctic Sea case, Voitenko said, “Yes, it was because of the Arctic Sea.”
Russian authorities say the Maltese-flagged Arctic Sea and its 15 Russian crew members were seized by eight hijackers near Sweden on July 24 and freed by the Navy off the west African coast on Aug. 17. But authorities have failed to offer a coherent and plausible version of what happened, including why hijackers would seize a ship reportedly carrying only $1.8 million in timber and why the ship’s Arkhangelsk-based crew was barred from contacting relatives for more than a week after they arrived in Moscow.
The ship was listed as carrying the timber from Finland to Algeria, but several commentators, including Voitenko, who was the only source of information about the case in the first days of the drama, have speculated that it might have been involved in illegal arms smuggling.
Voitenko said Wednesday afternoon that he had just flown to Istanbul. “I won’t stay here long. I will go to some other place,” he said.
Voitenko’s web site posted regular updates on the Arctic Sea case, citing unidentified sources, including people in the Defense Ministry.
Last month, after the ship was found, Voitenko gave a news conference at the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper’s offices where he said the sailors “got involved in a saga with government interests.”
He was quoted in a Time magazine article published Monday with the headline, “Was Russia’s ‘Hijacked’ Ship Carrying Missiles to the Mideast?”
Before becoming editor of the web site, Voitenko spent 15 years as a sailor. He told Radio Rossiya in an interview last year that he is “fanatical about the merchant navy.”
Voitenko had contact with the crew members’ relatives in the first days of the incident, and his web site was the first to publish an open letter from the crew members’ wives, asking the Russian government to open an investigation.
Right after the appearance of the letter, President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the Defense Ministry to find the Arctic Sea and liberate it if it had been captured.
Voitenko said Wednesday that he was not communicating with the relatives. “The relatives are silent. I mustn’t let the relatives down. It will be the worse for them,” he said, without elaborating. “If they consider that I did something good, they can write me a thank you.”
He also said he would continue to work on his web site, Sovfrakht Marine Bulletin. The site crashed for several hours on Wednesday, showing an error message, before resuming normal service.
It first crashed on Friday afternoon for reasons Voitenko could not explain but worked again Monday and Tuesday. The web site includes a forum where the Arctic Sea case was discussed by experts and sailors.
Voitenko continued to work Wednesday, offering comments to Ukrainian and Russian journalists on the case of Ariana, a ship with a Ukrainian crew captured by Somali pirates.
His bulletin is published by Sovfrakht-Sovmortrans Shipping Group.
Andrei Soldatov, an analyst who tracks the secret services at the Agentura think tank, said the intimidation described by Voitenko was not typical of the secret services toward Russian citizens, although foreign journalists might be expelled under similar circumstances.
He called the pressure to leave the country “very, very strange,” saying that secret services would be more likely simply to speak to Voitenko or close his web site.
“The question is: Who talked to him? It does not look like the secret services but arms traders, illegal arms traders or someone like that,” Soldatov said.
This is not the first case of an independent-minded Internet journalist fleeing Russia under pressure.
Roza Malsagova, the editor of Ingushetiya.ru, an Ingush opposition web site, fled with her three children in August last year and applied for political asylum in France. Magomed Yevloyev, the site’s publisher, was shot dead in police custody weeks later.
The eight suspected hijackers of the Arctic Sea have been charged with piracy and kidnapping and are awaiting trial in the Lefortovo prison.
Eleven of the ship’s sailors returned home to Arkhangelsk on Sunday. They have refused to speak to reporters, saying sarcastically that they disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle where they were fed ice cream by pirates.
Voitenko has suggested that the sailors have been persuaded to keep silent.
The authorities say the other four sailors are taking the ship to Novorossiisk. It is expected to arrive in mid-September
by Penguin » Thu Sep 03, 2009 3:37 am
by Sweejak » Thu Sep 03, 2009 3:45 am
Voitenko has suggested that the sailors have been persuaded to keep silent.
by Sweejak » Thu Sep 03, 2009 10:38 am
Editor denies "disappearance" reportsSeptember 3, 2009
After the Moscow Times reported that Mikhail Voitenko, editor of the Sovfrakht Marine Bulletin website, had fled Russia after receiving death threats from Russian government officials, a message puporting to be from Voitenko himself has appeared on the site, saying that he has not disappeared, is on business in Istanbul, Turkey, and is preparing “some interesting reports”. Voitenko repeats his request to the media “to leave the crew of the Arctic sea alone”, and says that in three or four days the Sovfrakht Bulletin website will resume normal operation.
by Sweejak » Thu Sep 03, 2009 12:08 pm
by Penguin » Thu Sep 03, 2009 12:17 pm
Sweejak wrote:I think that the threat was genuine. A Novosti correspondent describes a call.
All of this presumes, among other things, that it was indeed Voitenko who who was on the line to Novosti.
http://tinyurl.com/l5um85
by Sweejak » Thu Sep 03, 2009 12:59 pm
by Sweejak » Thu Sep 03, 2009 1:13 pm
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