Governor of Russian Pacific Region and Aides on Missing Copter
August 21, 2003
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
MOSCOW, Aug. 20 - A helicopter carrying the governor and other senior officials of the Pacific region of Sakhalin disappeared today while flying toward the Kurile Islands. An airborne search for the helicopter was suspended at nightfall, dimming hopes that the helicopter and those aboard would be found safe. There were conflicting reports on the number of people on the helicopter, but a spokeswoman for Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said tonight that as many as 18 passengers and 3 crew members were believed to have boarded before it took off from an airport on the Kamchatka Peninsula at 2:45 p.m. Its last radio message came 15 minutes later, and the helicopter failed to reach its destination, the city of Severo-Kurilsk on the island of Paramushir, according to officials cited in Russian media reports. Kamchatka is rugged and sparsely populated, complicating the search. The helicopter presumably went down near the peninsula's southern tip or plunged into the Sea of Okhotsk. One official told the NTV network tonight that there was a chance it had landed safely and was simply out of radio contact. Russia's defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, ordered naval warships to join in the search. The Russian military has been conducting one of its largest exercises since the collapse of the Soviet Union along the country's eastern coast, involving 75 warships and 30,000 troops. The Sakhalin governor, Igor P. Farkhutdinov, 53, has served in his post since 1995, when President Boris N. Yeltsin appointed him by decree. He was elected to the governorship in 2000. From 1996 to 2001, he simultaneously served as a member of the upper house of Parliament. As governor, he has overseen an economic boom in Sakhalin, spurred by foreign investment in the region's oil and gas industry. In an interview in May, Mr. Farkhutdinov confidently predicted that foreign investment in the remote island region would double to $1.3 billion this year, putting it on track to surpass Moscow as the country's top destination for foreign capital. Among the other passengers on board were his aides and deputies overseeing the region's health, transport, education, energy and fishing departments. The helicopter, a civilian MI-8 operated by a company called GUP-Khalatyrka, is typical of those used to traverse Russia's far-flung regions, especially in Siberia and the Far East. The model is considered one of the most reliable built in the Soviet Union, but many of those in operation are reported to suffer from age, inadequate maintenance and poor training; crashes are common. Aleksandr I. Lebed, the former general, presidential candidate and governor of the Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia, and seven others died in April 2002 when the MI-8 they were in hit a power line in heavy fog and crashed. This month, a regional court indicted the helicopter's two pilots, who survived, charging them with violating safety procedures.
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