SPANISH COPTER crash in Afghanistan update:

Spanish investigators suspect an accident rather than an attack caused the military helicopter crash in Afghanistan that killed all 17 Spanish soldiers on board, officials said on Wednesday.

But the armed forces still were not completely ruling out that the helicopter may have been shot down on Tuesday, a spokesman in the prime minister's office said.

"Nothing has been ruled out, but the experts say that so far there is no evidence that it could have been neither attack nor friendly fire," the spokesman said. "There were very strong winds in the area," he said, reports Reuters.

Well, instead of experts, why not asking witnesses, the ones travelling on the second helicopter -the one which had to make an emergency landing-?

"We all felt a strong impact, like an explosion, and our helicopter began turning until it fell to the ground," said an unnamed soldier who was among the five injured, and who was interviewed by phone by the La Voz de Galicia newspaper.

"The others, the ones in front, must have been hit full blast," he was quoted as saying.

"When we came down, their aircraft was already burning."

Also in La Voz de Galicia, a parent of one of the dead soldiers was quoted as saying that they had received a call from the pilot of the second craft, informing them of the death of their son.

"Their helicopter was shot down. They were fired on from the ground, they were attacked," the pilot was quoted as telling the family.

The paper said that 10 of the 17 Spaniards who died in the incident were from Galicia, a region in the northwest of the country.

Most Spanish media meanwhile reported that only a few seconds before the crash, the pilots of the two craft were apparently unaware of any problems.

Six seconds before the incident, the pilots of the second helicopter asked the other over the radio how things were going.

"Great," replied the pilot of the aircraft which went down.

Which is not what one would expect to hear from someone who was low-flying a helicopter under strong enough winds that would ultimately bring the aircraft down.

Meanwhile, a top Afghan defense ministry official had another explanation:

"What is clear for us is that there was definitely no attack by militants," said Maj. Gen. Shar Mohammed Karimi. "We suspect one of the helicopters may have accidentally hit the other while flying. The other possibility is that the choppers had technical problems."

So that makes at least three different explanations. Some military officials I hear earlier today on the radio were doubtful that the crash was caused by the wind; seing the picture of the blast that was released by authorities, they say that an aircraft falling down because of winds doesn't leave a straight mark on the ground (see foreground in picture here; the copter in the background is a rescue team.)

Bono, Spain's defense minister, is clever enough to present it as an accident -which bodes better with a pacifist country that only participates in humanitarian missions- but just in case he doesn't rule out an attack.

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