He said that this decision had been unanimously taken at the Friday meeting of the committee attended by 29 parents of the killed children.
According to Khammatov, the parents held the meeting and took such a decision primarily because of the statement made by the committee's lawyer-coordinator Yulia Fedotova who had earlier announced that the parents of the perished children were ready to accept the $150,000 compensation for each air crash victim offered by the Swiss air traffic control service Skyguide on condition that the parents withdraw the compensation claim they had filed with one of the U.S. district courts.
According to the Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper, the above offer was made during a closed-door meeting between Skyguide lawyers and parents of the air crash victims held in the German city of Potsdam on Tuesday.
Zulfat Khammatov said that Yulia Fedotova had voiced the opinion held by only twenty parents on whose behalf she had been holding talks with Skyguide lawyers. At the same time, he emphasized, the committee's meeting in Ufa on Friday was attended by the majority of the parents involved.
Khammatov stated that no one had authorized Fedotova to hold talks on an out-of-court settlement of the compensation problems on behalf of the relatives of the perished children. "In future, Ms. Fedotova must take due account of the opinions held by all the relatives of the air crash victims," Khammatov stressed.
It is evident, therefore, according to the local lawyers, that the relatives of the air crash victims have sharply diverged as to the subsequent course of the air crash investigation, prosecution of all those guilty and payment of compensation. As things stand now, the outlook for a final settlement of the compensation issue by the date of the tragedy's second anniversary, which many relatives of the air crash victims have been hoping for, is far from clear.
The final report of the commission investigating the catastrophe, which had claimed 69 lives, was published in May. Experts agreed that the collision of the Russian Tu-154 passenger jet with the Boeing cargo plane resulted from a mistake committed by Skyguide air traffic controllers. This gives solid grounds for lawyers to demand compensation.
The air crash occurred on July 2, 2002 over southern Germany, 120 kilometers south of Stuttgart, after a collision of a Bashkir Airlines Tu-154 passenger jet on a charter flight from Moscow's Domodedovo airport to Barcelona, with a DHL transport plane Boeing-757 en route from Bahrain to Brussels. The Russian plane carried 57 passengers aboard, including 52 children from Bashkortostan on their way to a seaside holiday in Spain, and 12 crew members. The Boeing transport plane, steered by two pilots, carried no passengers. As a result of the crash, none of those on board both planes survived. The collision occurred a few minutes after the German air traffic controllers had transferred guidance of the Russian plane to their Swiss colleagues.
