Russian investigators analyzing wreckage from Siberian 1812 recovered from the Black Sea have discovered "foreign objects" and other evidence that suggests that a missile hit the flight from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk. At the same time, the Russians are demanding clarifications from Ukraine about the launch of a specific SA200 missile fired several minutes before the explosion that destroyed the Tupelov 154.

Ukrainian forces had been carrying out live-missile firing exercises on the Crimean Black Sea peninsula some 200 kilometers (125 miles) away at the time a Russian TU-154 airliner carrying up to 78 people, most of them Israelis, exploded and crashed into the sea. Within hours, unnamed Pentagon sources said that a missile fired off target during the exercises caused the explosion. Ukraine has conceded that the theory could not be discounted, but continues to deny involvement.

The destruction of the Tu-154 aircraft was caused by "explosion damage", said Vladimir Rushaylo, head of the Russian state commission investigating the crash. This conclusion was reached through the examination of the aircraft wreckage and the fragments of its interior. There were "numerous holes of similar shape", he said, adding that objects which were "not part of the aircraft" have also been found.

While there was initially speculation that the holes were caused by bullets, suggesting a terrorist attack, experts say that surface-to-air missiles contains thousands of ball bearings for fragmentation, which could have produced holes similar in size and shape to holes created by bullets.

In addition, the Russian team has identified several foreign objects. "There are objects which have been found which were not related to a plane," Rushaylo told a news conference in Sochi, the nearest Black Sea port city to the crash site.

Officials involved with the salvage effort described a cylindrical object that they could not immediately identify. An object described as resembling a wooden log was floating in the water. It was oval, a dark color and mostly submerged, with a length of 15-20 meters (50-66 feet), said Sergei Kargin, deputy head of the Sochi rescue service. Vyacheslav Petrov, an Emergency Situations Minister helicopter pilot, said the object has a cylindrical form, and was in a vertical position, like a fishing bob. There was speculation that this may have been one of the jettisonable, solid propellant boosters of the SA200 missile.

One country that has been less than cooperative is Ukraine. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said that President Vladimir Putin was unhappy with the information the Ukrainians had provided so far. "The president was not satisfied with the material, it is of an insufficiently complete nature," the official said. The Russians are reportedly frustrated by the difficulty of extracting specific information from Ukraine about the anti-aircraft training exercise suspected of being of responsible for the explosion.

"I have sent an urgent request to my Ukrainian counterpart (Defense Minister) Oleksander Kuzmuk for more technical information on the launch of a S200 missile which was fired on October 4 at 1341 Moscow time (0941 GMT)," Ivanov told Russia's RTR television channel.

Ukranian military sources continue to deny any involvement in the affair. The army says that commanders of the anti-aircraft batteries that took part in the exercise calculated the trajectories of the missiles, checked their hits and came to the "unequivocal conclusion" that no missile was fired during the exercise in the area where the plane was hit. But Ukraine agreed to take the missile scenario into account in its own investigation.

Rushaylo said that Russia intended to work jointly with Israel, the USA and Turkey for the "exchange of any information that these countries have at their disposal at present, in order to study the aircraft's journey on the Tel Aviv - Novosibirsk route."

Israeli forensic experts arrived as the site after sundown Saturday to help in the search for victims and debris. Underwater apparatus brought by the Israeli team could help locate the black box flight recorders which could explain what happened to the aircraft. But officials concede they will be difficult to find in the deep waters.

More than one hundred relatives of the dead passengers arrived in Sochi by Saturday evening. Only 16 bodies have been retrieved from the Black Sea waters. Rabbi Berel Lazar, the Chief Rabbi of the Federation of Jewish Congregations in Russia, said that this would probably be the final number of bodies to be retrieved as they were floating on the surface, while the remaining bodies have probably sunk to the sea floor. Army Radio reported this morning that six bodies have been identified by relatives.

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