Vitaly Kaloyev, a stooping 52-year-old dressed in black, is climbing the
darkened staircase in his house. He motions towards his study and says:
“Konstantin used to play on that computer.” He continues to a bedroom at the
end of the hallway, where windows look out onto a snow-covered suburb of
Vladikavkaz, Russia. There are dolls, a globe, a desk; and photographs of
two children and their mother hang above a bed and a cot. Hunching in the
corner of a sofa, Kaloyev lights a cigarette. “The whole house is their
memorial,” he intones, staring into space. “As long as I’m alive.”
Kaloyev’s most precious photos aren’t on the wall. He walks next door to fetch
them. “I asked for them,” he explains. The first shot is of Diana, his
daughter, in her coffin. She was four, and has flowers in her hair and a
bloody gash on her cheek. Another shows Konstantin, his son, who was 10. He
looks nothing like the smiling boy in the picture frames. His face has been
smashed and crudely stitched back together. “I dressed them myself,” Kaloyev
murmurs. “I couldn’t bury them dirty.” Svetlana, his wife, then 44, is
wrapped in a shroud, with a suit and shoes laid on top. She was the most
mutilated after the 35,000ft fall.
But it’s hard to sympathise completely. His wife, children and 68 others were
killed on July 1, 2002, when a plane taking them from Moscow to Barcelona
collided with a cargo jet over Germany. Almost two years after the
collision, Kaloyev turned up on the Swiss doorstep of the air-traffic
controller who was on duty on the night of the crash, Peter Nielsen, and
stabbed him to death. Nielsen’s wife and children were home at the time.
Kaloyev is defiant about the killing. He compares Nielsen to Hitler and calls
him a murderer. He’s convinced Nielsen was wholly responsible for the crash;
investigators, meanwhile, state that while Nielsen bore partial
responsibility, the accident resulted from a series of mistakes and unlucky
coincidences. Kaloyev doesn’t seem to care much about the suffering of
Nielsen’s family. And in a bewildering turn of events, after serving almost
four years in a Swiss jail, Kaloyev has become something of a hero. When he
returned to Russia last November, members of a pro-Putin group lined the
road with signs praising him as a “real human”. Letters of support arrived
from across the country and women asked to marry him. A civil engineer by
profession, he’s been made deputy construction minister in the region of
North Ossetia.
This outpouring of sympathy for Kaloyev hinges not only on empathy for a man
who has lost everything, but also on Ossetian traditions – and
understandings – of loss and revenge.
) ) ) ) )
Vladikavkaz huddles at the base of the Caucasus mountains, a city of decaying
houses from Tsarist times interspersed with brutal Soviet-era apartment
buildings. Though residents sing its praises as a holiday destination in
summer, when the weather is balmy, it’s a tense place, not least because of
its proximity to Chechnya. Shootings and explosions are frequent in
neighbouring Ingushetia, and there has been a series of bombs in
Vladikavkaz’s outdoor markets – in 1999 more than 50 people were killed in
the central market.
Police, who are routinely seen on patrol, now prevent shoppers from taking
cameras inside the central market, presumably in case photos are used in the
planning of future attacks. Locals advise visitors not to walk around the
city alone at night, and anyone who looks foreign is at risk of being hauled
to a police station for questioning.
Kaloyev was born to a poor family in a village nearby, one of six children,
and studied at a mining institute in Vladikavkaz. He met Svetlana in 1990,
and later built their house, an imposing brick edifice behind metal walls.
She became a deputy director at a brewery, and he worked on buildings all
over town – factories, offices, a church. They had two children; Konstantin
loved dinosaurs and Diana had dozens of dolls. Friends talk of Kaloyev –
tall and now grizzled, with a deep chuckle that reveals a mouth full of
crooked teeth – fondly. “He was kind, cheerful. I never heard a rude word,”
says Oleg Kusov, a neighbour.
In 2001 and ’02, Kaloyev was renovating a villa near Barcelona. Svetlana and
their children were to join him for a beach holiday.
On Monday July 1, 2002, they tried to find last-minute tickets to Barcelona
after arriving in Moscow from Vladikavkaz. They ended up on the Bashkirian
Airlines Tupolev 154 by chance. It was chartered at short notice for 45
school children from the city of Ufa who had missed their Barcelona flight
on Saturday. They were also going to the coast, after winning a competition.
“This was just another adventure for them; not all of them had been to
Moscow,” says their tour operator, Tatyana Ostapenko. The Kaloyevs and a few
others got seats on the flight at the last minute. “I spoke with [my family]
for the last time that day at noon,” Kaloyev recounts. “Svetlana rang this
company, dashed over, and they offered her seats.”
The half-empty Tupolev departed Moscow at 6.48pm, heading southwest. Just over
two hours later, a Boeing 757 cargo plane operated by DHL took off from
Bergamo, Italy, for a northerly hop to Brussels. The two jets, both
commanded by experienced crews, were due to cross paths just north of Lake
Constance, where the borders of Switzerland, Germany and Austria meet. As
they approached each other, they entered airspace controlled by the private
firm Skyguide, which is responsible for the skies above Switzerland, as well
as parts of southern Germany and eastern France.
Two controllers were on duty in Skyguide’s Zurich control centre that evening.
As per unofficial company policy, however, one was resting in the employee
lounge in preparation for the early morning aerial rush hour. That left
Peter Nielsen, a Dane who had worked at Skyguide since the mid-1990s, on
duty. He had a mostly excellent record, though in May 2001 he was
investigated after a midair near-collision that occurred when he was working
the screens alone.
On July 1, there was a problem that he wasn’t aware of: the system that
flashes a visual alert if a collision is imminent was out of action owing to
renovation work. The main phone lines were also down. As the Boeing and
Tupolev approached each other at 36,000ft, Nielsen was doing the work of two
controllers, and moving his chair back and forth between adjacent screens.
He was focused on an Airbus approaching nearby Friedrichshafen airport – as
a result of a glitch in the backup phone system, he repeatedly dialled the
control tower but couldn’t get through.
About two minutes before the crash, the Russian pilots were discussing a plane
that their collision warning system had picked up to their left. At the same
time, a controller in Karlsruhe, Germany, realised that the planes were on a
crash course, but despite repeated attempts, couldn’t get through to Nielsen
by telephone. With just 43 seconds to go, Nielsen ordered the Tupolev to
descend after noticing the impending collision. Moments later,
collision-avoidance systems on board the planes sounded, commanding the
Boeing to descend and the Tupolev to climb.
International guidelines stipulate pilots must follow the anti-collision
system – however, the Tupolev manual gives precedence to instructions from
air-traffic controllers. The Tupolev crew followed Nielsen’s command and
descended, despite a brief debate in the cockpit. Nielsen told them to
descend more urgently, and did not see that the Boeing had also lost
altitude. He turned his attention back to the arriving plane.
A few seconds later, passengers seated on the left of the Tupolev may have
seen “not really an object, but the lights of an aircraft”, says the crash
investigator Jens Friedemann. Then, at 34,890ft, the tail of the Boeing
rammed into the wing and fuselage of the Tupolev at a right angle. Cockpit
voice recorders in both planes logged electronic beeps, swearing and cries
immediately after the impact. There was an explosive decompression aboard
the Tupolev, and it broke up. Forty passengers were flung into the sky.
Wreckage and bodies fell into fields and the gardens of residents of the
lakeside town of Uberlingen. Having lost most of its vertical stabiliser,
the Boeing was crippled and it spiralled into a wood. Nielsen tried to call
the Tupolev for two more minutes after the collision, though there was no
response.
Kaloyev was waiting at Barcelona airport and was told about the crash by
reporters. “I thought that there was some kind of mistake. That kind of
thing can’t happen,” he recalls. He flew to Zurich the next morning, and was
one of the first relatives at the crash scene. “What can I tell you about
this terrible spectacle? There was debris from the plane, the scattered
bodies of children.” His wife slammed into a field, his son into asphalt by
a bus shelter. Diana’s plunge was broken by trees. “Where the girl fell,” he
says haltingly, “I collected her hair, the beads from her necklace.” He had
enough presence of mind to find out about Nielsen from journalists and
rescuers. “On the second or third day after the tragedy I already knew where
he lived, I knew that he had two kids.”
Returning to Vladikavkaz, Kaloyev practically lived at the cemetery, relatives
say. He installed a granite gravestone engraved on one side with solemn
portraits, and on the other with a tender group picture. It is set outside
the family’s house, with the church Kaloyev built in the background. The
memorial cost over £25,000, according to Kaloyev’s older brother Yury, a
doctor at a Moscow military hospital. “You bathe your dead children, dress
them, put them in coffins. Can a person bear this?” asks Yury. “It’s
impossible to imagine. He had terrible depression. He woke up at nights,
went to the graveyard.”
Kaloyev wasn’t only grief-stricken – he was increasingly angry. Haggling over
money with the company seemed an affront to his family’s memory, and the
relatives were disappointed by a lawyer who promised $1.5m compensation per
victim; it turned out to be far more than Skyguide was willing to pay.
Kaloyev felt that Skyguide hadn’t officially apologised for causing the
crash (although Alain Rossier, then CEO of Skyguide, says he apologised to
Kaloyev for his company’s errors a year after the crash). And in Kaloyev’s
eyes, Nielsen seemed to have escaped punishment. The crash was being
investigated, and he was suspended as an air-traffic controller, but after a
break he returned to work at Skyguide.
In February 2004, Kaloyev flew to Zurich, with plans to continue to Barcelona.
Kaloyev took a switchblade knife with a 10-centimetre blade, though he says
he always carries one.
“I didn’t go to murder. I went so that they would apologise to my children. I
didn’t hide that I was going there – I phoned them, I agreed with them
on a meeting. What did they do? They told me off, they tried to wriggle out
of it.” Rossier, however, maintains that he had no knowledge of
Kaloyev booking a meeting. Skyguide employees, for their part, weren’t
expecting any trouble, scoffs the spokesman Patrick Herr.
“I’ve never met anyone that thinks, ‘Oh, an accident; absolutely, there’s a
murder to follow.’”
In Zurich, Kaloyev tried to find a priest who had counselled him after the
crash, and also get some Swiss watches fixed (he eventually sent them for
repair while he was in jail). He stayed in a king-size room at the Welcome
Inn in Kloten. “He had pictures in his room of his family, just normal
pictures,” says the manager Simona Huonder. “He hardly spoke any English,
and came to the bar and asked for pivo – beer in Russian.”
Three days after he arrived, he went to see Nielsen at his home, a short walk
from the hotel. Nielsen’s wife, Mette, and two children were also there.
Kaloyev waited on their terrace before Nielsen noticed and came down. He
says he tried to show Nielsen the photos of Konstantin and Diana. Nielsen,
however, batted them out of his hand, and they fell to the ground. That
infuriated Kaloyev. “He practically killed my children before my eyes a
second time,” he explains. “It seemed to me they turned over in the
graves.”
Kaloyev has always maintained that he doesn’t remember what happened next. “My
eyes went dark,” he says. But Mette “heard a cry, looked out the window, and
saw her husband on the floor outside”, reports the Zurich public prosecutor
Pascal Gossner. He had been repeatedly stabbed. “Then she took her children
and ran away.”
“The police told me later [he died],” Kaloyev says glibly. “I returned to the
hotel – I don’t remember how. His wife gave a statement saying I didn’t run,
nothing. I peacefully returned. I have no idea where she saw me from.”
Though he was covered in blood, he made it back to his room without being
noticed. Hotel staff didn’t see anything unusual – he may have entered
through the car park. The next day police arrested Kaloyev there. They found
bloody clothes near the hotel and spots of blood in his room. His relatives
were taken aback. “He was never aggressive. He wasn’t able to be. We were
never scared about this,” emphasises Vladimir Gagiyev, the brother of
Kaloyev’s late wife.
He was briefly held in a mental hospital, and in October 2005 was sentenced to
eight years in a Swiss jail. Kaloyev says he grew flowers, tomatoes and
cucumbers in a garden there. The killing in Zurich seemed to come back to
him only once, in distorted form. “I had a nightmare one time – it was when
I was still in prison, three months after I arrived. I was fighting with
someone, or something, and my middle brother separated us. I hit my brother
in the face, and broke his teeth and,” Kaloyev suddenly claps, “I woke up.”
The German crash-investigation report had principally blamed Skyguide and the
Russian crew, and in November 2007 four Skyguide executives were convicted
of manslaughter for their role in the crash. Three were given 12-month
suspended sentences and the fourth received a fine of £5,500. Mette Nielsen
moved back to Denmark. She does not give interviews. The company kept a
flower on her late husband’s desk for some time after the murder. He was a
“very professional, open, very nice guy. He didn’t deserve what he got”,
says Rossier.
A Swiss court cut Kaloyev’s sentence after it was ruled he could not be held
fully accountable for his action, and he was released. There were reports
that it was down to pressure from Russian officials, though a spokesman for
the Swiss justice department denies this. Now, Kaloyev has his new job and
office, and is supervising the construction of a ski resort. Recently he
says he hosted a delegation from Norman Foster’s architectural practice and
took them out to dinner. Friends and family constantly visit him to ensure
he doesn’t sink any deeper into misery.
) ) ) ) )
Though many Russians disapprove of Kaloyev, he has received wide-ranging
support. After his conviction, the prominent parliamentary deputy, Alexei
Mitrofanov, was reported to have said: “As a man, I simply have to raise my
hat to him.” The North Ossetian president was at his trial. Some of the
parents bereaved in the crash also think well of him. A group went to see
him in jail. They chatted in the prison cafe and presented him with tea,
honey and a memorial book about the tragedy. “Let him live longer, be
healthy, work,” says Zulfat Khammatov, whose son died in the collision.
His popularity partly stems from burgeoning Russian nationalism, which has
been fuelled by Vladimir Putin’s anti-western rhetoric. Kaloyev is portrayed
as the victim of a legal system that treated him less compassionately
because he is Russian, and as having defended his family’s honour when the
Swiss authorities did not immediately pack Nielsen off to prison. “That’s
what western democracy is like,” complains Yury, Kaloyev’s brother.
There are also local explanations for the rapturous reception he received.
North Ossetians say they, perhaps more than other Russians, understand
Kaloyev’s grief.
Thirteen miles down the road from Vladikavkaz is Beslan, where, in September
2004, more than 330 people, including 186 children, died after the three-day
hostage-taking in a school gymnasium ended in a shoot-out. Today, the gym is
a windowless shell filled with flowers, toys and lined with photos of the
dead. A cross stands in the middle, and there’s sometimes a whiff of burnt
wood or plastic. Relatives visit the school and weep – some live opposite
and see the pulverised buildings from their windows.
North Ossetians speak of Beslan as a communal tragedy, just like the bombs in
Vladikavkaz. They sympathise with Kaloyev as a fellow sufferer. “I think of
him like my brother,” says Svetlana Tsgoyeva, whose granddaughter died in
the school. “Our sorrow is the same,” repeats Susanna Dudiyeva, whose son
was killed. Kaloyev visited her house after leaving jail. “He told us about
his fear – of what his children felt when they fell from 35,000ft. We think
about what our kids endured for 52 hours.”
He is even seen as a role model, says Yana Voitova, a local journalist. “A lot
of people say, ‘If only there was such a person to enact justice for us.’ ”
Kaloyev is praised, too, for having acted according to the Ossetian tradition
of blood revenge, when a man wreaks vengeance for the killing of a family
member by killing a relative of the murderer. The practice is said to no
longer exist, and Kaloyev, whose great-grandfather was a mediator between
blood enemies, denies it was his motivation. But that’s how onlookers have
interpreted the killing. “When there’s no justice [in a court], there must
be a reciprocal response,” says Taimuraz Khutiyev, the deputy head of the
North Ossetian elders’ association. He adds approvingly: “What he did was an
example of heroism.”
Kaloyev’s case continues to resonate across Russia – it has sparked a debate
on whether the government and judicial system, accused of corruption, can
protect citizens. In January, the St Petersburg resident Alexander Kuznetsov
confessed to beating to death an Uzbek immigrant. He says he found the man
raping his eight-year-old son, though there were no witnesses. Kuznetsov and
Kaloyev had a telephone conversation that was broadcast on TV; Kaloyev told
Kuznetsov to be strong. The reaction in some quarters has been of resigned
approval. “Parents are defending their children as best they can,” opines
one of Russia’s top-selling papers. “He acted correctly,” Kaloyev tells me.
“You have to destroy these monsters.”
) ) ) ) )
After Sunday lunch, Kaloyev drives in his pick-up to the cemetery. He walks up
to the gravestone, which stands on a huge block of granite, and lightly
touches his head against the picture of each family member.
Even though the temperature is just above zero, Kaloyev takes off his jacket.
He fetches a towel from a cupboard nearby, and, bending forward in front of
the stone as if he were prostrating himself before an altar, he walks
backwards and drags the towel across the slab; it is slick with melting
snow. “I removed the water – isn’t it more beautiful?” he calls. “Water
destroys the granite.” He moves up and down the slab as if he were mowing a
lawn. It takes him 15 minutes. “My legs hurt,” he says.
Heading back to town, Kaloyev suggests that the killing might not be finished.
“What if the relatives of the dead children go to the Nielsens’ house in
Denmark?” he demands. “Why wouldn’t they go? Perhaps someone’s still not
satisfied?”
He says he sometimes thinks about Nielsen’s children. But they seem to
arouse disgust, not compassion. I ask what would happen if Nielsen’s son
came to Vladikavkaz to meet him. Kaloyev looks out over the city’s empty
streets and sneers. “I don’t think he’s brave enough to come.
Just like his father wasn’t brave.”
