Murder suspect haunted by family's air deaths

28 February 2004 07:17


Yuri Kaloyev knew his brother was a broken man even before he
disappeared a week ago. Two years after his wife, son and daughter,
victims of a head-on plane collision over the Swiss-German border, had
been laid to rest amid the sombre rows of a cemetery in their home
town of Vladikavkaz, in southern Russia, his family's ghosts still
haunted his nights. "You could find my brother, even at 2am, at the
cemetery crying on their gravestones," Yuri Kaloyev said. "He
suffered. He could not work. He locked himself away."

On Friday, however, the desolate truth about his brother began to
emerge. Descriptions given by the Swiss police of a man they have
arrested for the savage stabbing to death on Tuesday of the air
traffic controller widely blamed for the plane crash closely fit
Kaloyev.

He is 48. He lost his wife Svetlana, 10-year-old son Konstantin and
four-year-old daughter Diana in the disaster in July 2002, when the
Russian charter aircraft in which they were travelling ploughed into a
cargo plane in the night sky above Germany. While the Russian foreign
ministry have requested confirmation of the arrested man's identity,
the only other man who lost his entire family in the crash, Vladimir
Savchuck, has appeared on Russian TV, deploring the killing.

Before arresting their suspect on Wednesday, Swiss police admitted a
relative of one of the victims of the crash might have been
responsible. On Friday, however, as fresh details emerged, it appeared
that they were dealing with an unprecedented case -- of deliberate
slow-burning revenge by a grief-crazed relative who had nothing left
to lose.

According to investigators, on Tuesday last week Vitali Kaloyev phoned
a Swiss travel company and asked the firm to book him a hotel room
close to Zurich airport. On Saturday Kaloyev arrived in Zurich,
entirely legally, and checked into the Welcome-Inn hotel in the suburb
of Kloten.

Kaloyev, however, chose it for another, darker reason: the suburban
hotel is a short taxi ride away from where Peter Nielsen, the
36-year-old Danish air traffic controller widely blamed for the
catastrophic plane crash, lived with his wife and three children.

According to hotel staff, in the two days before the murder Kaloyev
did little to attract attention. "He was very quiet," the hotel's
manager, Simona Huonder, said on Friday. "We hardly saw him during the
time he stayed with us. He was on his own the whole time, mostly up in
his room." She added: "He didn't speak very good English. My colleague
who checked him in had to give him information slowly."

At breakfast Kaloyev ate alone, later flicking through brochures
offering city tours. "He seemed like any other tourist," Hounder said.
On Tuesday afternoon, however, Kaloyev left his hotel room -- No 316
-- and set off for Peter Nielsen's house, a half-hour's walk away. A
female neighbour of Nielsen spotted him. She then asked him what he
wanted. He waved a piece of paper with Nielsen's name on it. The
neighbour pointed to the air traffic controller's front door, but
instead of knocking on it, Kaloyev sat down in the front garden, near
a bench.

Nielsen, who had lived in Switzerland since 1995, had just returned
home from a trip to Geneva. His wife had picked him up from the
airport. He spotted the intruder, went outside, and asked him what he
wanted. Swiss detectives say that the couple's three children went
into the garden as well; the controller's wife then called them back,
and was inside herself when she heard a "kind of scream".

She rushed out to discover her husband lying in a pool of blood. The
victim and the killer who spoke "broken German" had had a brief
conversation; what they said, however, is unknown.

Nielsen's wife watched her husband's assailant run off; by the time
the police arrived at 6.17pm it was too late. The controller, who
suffered multiple injuries, had bled to death.

Clues for detectives were numerous. They had several good descriptions
-- of a burly, unshaven, dark-haired man in his late 40s or early 50s
who appeared to come from eastern Europe or Russia. They had a murder
weapon -- a 22cm jackknife with a 14cm blade that had been thrown away
near the scene. And they had a name: the chief suspect was a man who,
police said, had "behaved strangely" during the first anniversary of
the crash last summer in the German town of Überlingen. The man had
allegedly threatened officials from Skyguide -- the firm for which
Nielsen worked -- and described him as "scum".

So far, however, the suspect has denied involvement in the killing. On
Friday Kaloyev's brother said that in the months before the murder
Vitali had slowly fallen apart, despite support from his sisters, and
the traditional, strong family ties of Caucasus society. "His
condition was terrible. Imagine what you feel when you lose both your
beloved children and wife," he said. "He disappeared a week ago
without telling anyone. And that is all I know."

It is a tragic end to Kaloyev's seemingly endless grief at the loss of
his family. A native of Vladikavkaz, near the border with Chechnya, he
got a two-year contract to work as a builder and architect on a
project in Barcelona. Just as his contract ended, in June 2002, he
decided to prolong his stay in Spain, and asked his family to fly out
and join him for a month's holiday. He was waiting for them at
Barcelona airport when he learned of the crash.

Kaloyev was one of the first relatives to arrive at the scene, and
discovered the body of his daughter, still intact, almost two miles
from where the accident happened. "Diana dreamed of coming with her
mother and brother to see me," he wrote on a website commemorating the
crash's 71 victims, most of whom were Russian schoolchildren.

Remorse

Nielsen was the only person on duty when the disaster took place. He
had wrongly instructed the Bashkirian airlines plane to descend, even
though its onboard warning equipment told it to climb. The pilot
followed the controller's instructions and ploughed into a DHL cargo
plane that was descending in accordance with its own
collision-avoiding equipment. Nielsen expressed remorse at what had
happened, but in a statement issued after the tragedy pointed out that
he was not the only person responsible.

The apparent revenge killing, meanwhile, has shocked all those
involved in the still-unresolved fight to gain justice for the crash
victims. Yulia Fedotova, a lawyer representing the families, who lost
her own daughter Sofia (15) in the crash said she was "shocked" by the
controller's murder. She added: "We still do not have any official
confirmation that the murderer was Kaloyev. Mr Kaloyev's personal
trauma, however, was clear to those around him."

Margarita, wife to his brother Yuri, told the Izvestiya newspaper:
"Vitali suffered everything alone. And after two years, he was in such
a state that I would not be surprised if he would behave irrationally.
Anyone can put himself in his place: in a minute to lose all your
family."

Kaloyev's days in Vladikavkaz after the funeral appear to have slipped
by, marked by little more than visits to the cemetery. According to
Izvestiya, at the memorial service last year he took the head of
Skyguide, Alan Rossier, aside afterwards and asked him "uncomfortable
questions about who was to be blamed". Kaloyev agreed to come to the
Skyguide office the following day, the newspaper reported. According
to the paper's sources, "Kaloyev asked several times: do you think the
air controller is to blame? He also asked to meet him."

Yet his brother disputes the accounts. Yuri Kaloyev, who travelled
with him to Switzerland and Germany to collect his family's bodies
from the scene of the crash, reserves his own fury for the air traffic
control company Skyguide.

"All this talk and speculation in the newspapers about his abnormal
behaviour last year at the ceremony in Switzerland is rubbish. He was
fine. What is abnormal is the behaviour of Skyguide who did not sack
such an air controller and director as Alan Rossier."

The intensity of Kaloyev's grief remains clear in the internet eulogy
he wrote for his son.

Of Konstantin, who learned to speak at 18 months, read fairytales aged
three, loved dinosaurs and at aged five played computer games, he
wrote: "He would have become a good, well-educated person, useful to
society, were it not for this tragedy, which I cannot get over. I have
no strength."

- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004