Final report on causes of air crash over Lake Bodensee to be presented in Germany

The final report on the results of the investigation into the causes of the air crash over Lake Bodensee will be presented in Germany on Wednesday, May 19.

A Tu-154 aircraft of Bashkirskiye Avialinii (Bashkir Airlines) and a freight Boeing-757 collided there at a height of 11,000 m on the night from July 1 to July 2, 2002. The Russian airliner was carrying mainly children who were going to have a rest in Spain. There were only two pilots in the Boeing. As a result of the tragedy over Lake Bodensee, 71 people perished.

As representative of the German Office for Investigating Air Accidents (BVU) Frank Geldner told RIA Novosti, the presentation of the final report will be held in Kongress-Center of Braunschweig city (Lower Saxony state).

In the conversation held with the RIA Novosti correspondent on the eve of the presentation BVU director Wilfried Schulze stressed that the purpose of the nearly two-year-long investigation, carried out by his department, was "to find out the technical causes of the collision, and to work out recommendations for ruling out repetition of such tragedies in the future." Mr. Schulze specially noted that the tasks, determined by FRG legislation for BVU, "do not in the least include determination of anyone's fault or search for a concrete culprit, which is a prerogative of a prosecutor's investigation alone."