MOSCOW. Nov 20 (Interfax-AVN) - The Russian Defense Ministry flatly denies the possibility that the IL-18 Coot aircraft that crashed in the Tver region was hit by a missile.
"Air defenses did not carry out any exercises last night at the moment of the crash," Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky, head of the Russian Air Force press service, told Interfax on Tuesday. Drobyshevsky also stressed that "Air Force aviation did not carry out any flights in the disaster area."
The assumption that the IL-18 crash may have had the same causes as the October 4 incident, when a TU-154 Careless airliner was hit by a Ukrainian missile over the Black Sea, was voiced by a representative of the regional air traffic control in Krasnoyarsk on Tuesday.
In the meantime, Russian special services do not rule out that the crash was caused by a terrorist act.
The investigators are considering a terrorist act among other possible causes of the crash, the Federal Security Service department for the Tver region told Interfax on Tuesday.