Swiss detectives are hunting a man who stabbed to death an air traffic controller at his home in Zurich on Tuesday in what they believe may have been an act of revenge for a plane disaster.
Police confirmed they were looking into whether the murder was linked to the mid-air collision in July 2002 between a Russian charter aircraft and a cargo plane over southern Germany.
Seventy-one people -- most of them Russian schoolchildren -- were killed in the accident. The controller was the only person on duty at the time and was later blamed for the crash by investigators.
On Wednesday, Swiss investigators said they were looking for an unshaven, heavily built man, aged between 50 and 55, who spoke broken German and possibly came from eastern Europe.
On Tuesday evening, the man knocked on the door of the controller's family home in a suburb near Zurich airport. After a brief conversation, he stabbed the 36-year-old Danish controller to death in front of his wife.
The couple's three children are believed to have been at home at the time. The attacker fled on foot.
Detectives were trying to establish the killer's motives. The murdered air controller had not received any threats, they said.
"[Revenge] cannot be ruled out. We are looking into whether there is a link between the collision and the killing," said Pascal Gossner, the investigating public prosecutor.
Asked whether the murder might have been carried out by a hitman hired by a group of Russian relatives determined to get revenge, he replied: "It is possible. It could be a reason. You have to say he spoke broken German. But you cannot say he was from Russia. This is really speculation."
Gossner confirmed, however, that the murder suspect had recently arrived in Switzerland.
After the collision near the German town of Uberlingen, accident investigators discovered that the controller had told the Bashkirian Airlines plane to descend -- even though its onboard warning equipment warned 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.
The air traffic controller, who worked for the firm Skyguide, has never been publicly named. He had lived in Switzerland for five years when the crash took place, detectives said. Last night relatives of the crash victims said they were shocked by the news of the controller's murder.
Yulia Fedotova, who lost her daughter Sofia, 15, said: "We had hoped that he would stand before a court and [if they decided as much] he would be punished. "We are shocked by the news of course, and among the relatives of the victims I have spoken to, we feel sorrow for his wife and children who now have to live without a husband and father."
Most of the collision victims came from affluent families in Bashkiria, an oil-rich, mainly Muslim region.
Alan Rossier, head of the Swiss company Skyguide for which the controller worked, described the killing as "appalling" and said that the firm's employees were in shock.
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