Ukraine's President Kuchma Announces National Mourning

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, July 29, 2002

Ukraine's President Kuchma Announces National Mourning

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Ukraine prepared for a mass outpouring of grief on Monday at a memorial service on the airfield where 83 people were killed when a fighter jet cartwheeled into a crowd of spectators at a weekend air show.

Some families will start burying their dead as Ukrainians observe an official day of mourning..

Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma, seeking to apportion blame for the world's worst air show disaster, sacked or detained several top military officials following Saturday's crash.

In the first arrests, the prosecutor general of the ex-Soviet state detained Ukraine's former air force commander and other top military officials, saying "serious errors" in preparing the air show had contributed to the deaths.

There were "serious errors in organizing, preparing and conducting flights, in particular organizing demonstration flights in Lviv," his office said.

Kuchma sacked the country's air force commander Volodymyr Strelnykov on Saturday and moved swiftly a day later to fire the country's acting defense minister, Petro Shulyak. He declared Monday would be a day of national mourning.

The head of the state commission into the accident said there were two possible reasons for the crash, which injured more than a hundred people -- negligence among the top military ranks or plane failure.

Most analysts say spectators at the show should not have been allowed to sit or stand in any of the plane's flight paths.

But the moves were unlikely to provide much comfort for the relatives of those who died in the crash, those who were sitting at the bedsides of the injured, or other Ukrainians tired of hearing about accidents and death in their country.

Hundreds of relatives, friends and others were expected to attend a morning memorial service at the scene of the crash and some families were expected to start burying their dead.

The Lviv crash was the world's worst air show disaster, eclipsing the 70 killed in 1988 when three Italian jets collided, sending one into a crowd at the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany.

Source: Agencies

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