Yemen investigates military jet crash

Source : Xinhua

SANAA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Yemeni government started on Wednesday to examine the wreckage of a fighter jet which crashed into the capital Sanaa two days ago, an Air Force official said.

Major Mahdi Al-Aidrous, director of the information center at the Air Force, said the authorities have collected the debris of the Russian-made Sukhoi Su-22 jet to investigate the cause of the crash.

"The black box was badly damaged, but we will do what we can to investigate," he said.

Yemen is a key buyer of Russian weapons. But most of its weapons, especially the aircraft, have become old.

"Our planes are old, but honestly this is not the problem," Al- Aidrous said, adding that the "real problem" is that Yemeni air force does not have necessary equipment or workshops to conduct comprehensive checks before each takeoff.

"We have highly skilled technicians, but we don't have a factory to fix problems of warplanes," he said. "When we find a problem of a plane, we send that warplane to the country which produced it."

The crash of a military jet on Monday was the third one that took place in Sanaa over the past six months. Most of those accidents were blamed on technical problems.

"When a military transport plane fell down in the capital in November (2012), we discovered that a fuel leak was behind the tragedy," he said. "Still, there is something missing which is the secret behind those technical failures."

The official said that the government should address those problems concerning the air force, including low budget and security problems in general.

Al-Aidrous said that he can't rule out the possibility of sabotage behind the latest crash. "People sometimes fire at warplanes," he said.

Early Wednesday, gunmen fired at a helicopter in Rada town in the southern province of al-Bayda. "A bullet penetrated the helicopter carrying teams of the national dialogue conference, but no one was hurt," he said.

In February, a Sukhoi jet crashed, killing several people and injuring more than a dozen. The accident was blamed on a technical problem.