Airline officials refuse to rule out sabotage in crash tragedy

SILKAIR officials on Monday refused to rule out sabotage in the crash of an airliner in Indonesia which killed 104 people.

``Nothing has been ruled out because we have so little information so far,'' said Rick Clements, senior public affairs manager of SilkAir, a fully-owned subsidiary of Singapore Airlines Ltd.

Mr Clements was reacting to news reports here on Monday quoting Indonesian investigators as saying they ruled out sabotage or terrorism in the crash of SilkAir MI 185 into a Sumatran river on Friday.

``We are not ruling out anything. We are not speculating. The investigation will have to take its course,'' Mr Clements said.

Salvage workers have so far found only scraps of twisted steel and dismembered body parts in the murky Musi River.

Brigadier-General Riyamizard, chief-of-staff of the South Sumatra military command which is overseeing the search operation, said if there had been a bomb on the plane it would have exploded as a fireball in mid-air.

``Our information so far shows that the pilot was very much trying to control a plane going out of control,'' Brig Gen Riyamizard was quoted as saying by the Singapore Straits Times.

The plane's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, which could indicate what happened, have not yet been recovered.

The pilot of the plane, Tsu Way Ming, 41, was an experienced commercial and combat pilot and flight instructor with 6,900 hours flying time.

An Indonesian navy minesweeper joined a fleet from the Indonesian and Singaporean navies in the search. Agence France-Presse