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Boeing 738 Jet Crash Kills 61 In Russia; Russia Deploying 80 Rescuers To The Crash Site; Medics and Psychologists On Standby To Assist Families; State Media Says Flight Crashed On Second Landing Attempt; Flight Was Traveling From Dubai To Russia; Rostov-On-Don Airport Closed; Winds Were At 97 Kilometers Per Hour At Time Of Crash, According To State Media; Paris Terror Suspect Salam Abdeslam Captured; France Wants Abdeslam Extradited For Trial. Aired 12-12:30a ET

Aired March 19, 2016 - 00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

NICK PARKER, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, I'm Nick Parker in New York, and this is CNN "News Now." A passenger jet has crashed in Southern Russian, killing all 62 people on board. It happened as the Flydubai flight made a second attempt to land. Russian media report the investigation into the cause of the crash will take about two months. Officials say that bad weather is also likely to blame, but they're also considering technical fault or human error.

Turkey has been rocked by a new terror. A suicide bombing killed four people in Istanbul. It happened in a busy shopping area that's popular with tourists, and many of the 36 people wounded are foreign nationals. No one has claimed responsibility at this stage.

The lawyer for Salah Abdelslam says the terror suspect is cooperating with Belgian police, but will oppose extradition back to France. The lead suspect in last year's attacks in Paris was captured on Friday in the Brussel neighborhood of Molenbeek.

Brazil's political crisis took a new turn on Friday when a Supreme Court judge blocked former President Luis Ignacio Luna de Silva from serving in the cabinet. Now the appointment would have protected him from a corruption case. He would have served as Chief of Staff to President Dilma Roussell, who herself is facing impeachment charges.

That is your CNN "News Now." For viewers in Asia, "Amanpour" is next. For everyone else, that's you, CNN "Newsroom" starts right now.

Thanks for joining us. Straight not to our top story, the crash of Flydubai flight 981. All 62 people onboard that plane were killed when it crashed in Southern Russia on a flight from Dubai. Our senior international correspondent, Matthew Chance, joins me live now from Moscow. Matthew, good to have you with us. What's the latest that we're hearing from Russian investigators at this stage?

MATTHEW CHANCE, SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT, CNN, LONDON: Well, the investigation has got underway, of course. Both of the black box flight recorders have been retrieved. They're both apparently in good condition, according to the teams on the ground that have extracted them from the wreckage. The wreckage, by the way, is absolutely incredible as a spectacle. It's, it's virtually unrecognizable as an aircraft.

The force with which that Boeing 737 crashed into the tarmac at the airport, just short of the actual runway, in Rostov-on-Don in southwestern Russian is absolutely astonishing. You see some quite dramatic pictures we've got of the rescue workers sifting through the wreckage, the thousands of pieces there, to try and find important components. And of course, to put together the, the human remains for identification. Sixty-two people is the final death toll on that catastrophe; seven crew, 55 passengers. The big question, of course, is why did this Boeing 737 800, a very modern airliner in use all around the world, operated by a company with a good safety record, fall from the skies in this way to such devastating effect. Obviously the suspicion is falling at the moment on the weather conditions, which were very severe at the time of the landing. The first -- there was a first landing in fact that was attempted by this - by the crew of this aircraft, which was aborted because of the weather conditions.

Astonishingly, they then circled Rostov for two hours before attempting that second and fatal landing. And so one of the questions that investigators are going to want to answer is why. Why didn't they divert, like other aircraft did, to nearby airports in Russia? There was an airport just 150 miles away in Krasnodar, where an Aeroflot plane in the same situation landed perfectly safely. And so these are - this is one of the many questions that investigators will now have the job of trying to answer, Nick.

PARKER: Matthew Chance reporting live for us from Moscow. Matthew, thank you very much for that. Joining me live now on the phone is CNN aviation correspondent, Richard Quest. He joins us from Los Angeles. Richard, thanks very much for joining us. The first question I wanted to ask you is in connection with a graphic that we have, that I want to bring up, which Matthew just briefly referred to. And it's from Flightradar24.com, which shows the last route of the plane as it was circling above Rostov-on-Don for, for something like two hours, going round and round in circles. At what stage would a plane normally divert to another airport? Is there a protocol in place, or is this at the discretion of the pilot?

RICHARD QUEST, INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT, CNN: Well, it's always the pilot. The pilot or the captain in command is always in charge and has that discretion of, of what to do next. But that discretion is exercised by physical realities. So, first of all, is the weather going to change? Is there a likelihood of the weather going to change? Quite often even before they get overhead of an airport, the pilots know that they're going to have to divert because of bad weather or fog. But if they believe there's a chance that their - that the weather will improve, they will hold to see if that changes.

Now, Nick, there is a finite amount of fuel onboard and the pilot knows he needs, or she knows, they need to be able to get to their alternate airport with a reserve in mind for that. So that calculation, the moment an aircraft goes into a hold for weather, they are calculating how long will we be, how long can we hold before we must go to the alternate airport? A two-hour hold in these circumstances - those I've spoken to have an eyebrow. It's not unusual; it's not completely out of the realm, but a two-hour hold in these circumstances does seem on the long side.

PARKER: And, Richard, what more can you tell us about the airline, Flydubai, as a company overall and indeed its safety record?

QUEST: It's got an excellent safety record. Flydubai was set up in 2009 by the, the government of Dubai as the low-cost airline for the country. So, although it is separate from Emirates Airlines, it is complementary to it and indeed many of the - of the staff who set up Flydubai came from Emirates. So it has a strong aviation pedigree.

This is not some unknown, unknown airline. Now, Nick, one thing that they will be looking at very closely is the way in which the aircraft came out of the sky. The C - the closed circuit television pictures that we've been seeing of the explosion. But if you look at just before the explosion, you do see what appears to be, assuming these pictures are accurate and real, what appears to be the plane falling out the sky. This was not a crash landing. If that, if that picture is correct, and that is the plane falling out the sky, hitting the ground short of the runway, this wasn't a crash landing. Something happened. Either a wind shear or some form of, of failure, or complete and - one, one can't know. But the plane - or some form of stall. But the plane basically fell out of the sky before it hit the runway.

PARKER: An extremely significant point that. If that video is indeed confirmed to be authentic, it would appear that it was not a crash landing that took place on that Flydubai flight. And, Richard, finally you thoughts about the weather. This is something that's been pinpointed at a preliminary stage by the Russian authorities. How instrumental do you think it was?

QUEST: I, I'm - without seeing all the details and the exact meteorological details, but I'm guessing it's crucial in this. Because what happens, the weather as such creates a ser - I mean assuming it is safe to fly, and the issue then it will be why did they decide - how did this, how did one run off the runway? Now it's not unusual for pilots to say, well, we'll have another go and see if we can get in. But in this - if this weather was so bad that had held for two hours, then the investigation will look at why they decided to have another go, and not go into the alternate. As but again we come back to this what would have, what, what weather factor would have caused the plane to have fallen so dramatically? And you are looking at well-known phenomena like wind shear. You're looking a cloud burst, all these sort of things that could cause the aircraft to suddenly, dramatically, and catastrophically lose lift. Because looking at that video, that seems to have been what happened. The plane suddenly lost lift and then fell out of the sky. But it's too soon to say what that cause would have been.

PARKER: Richard Quest reporting live for us from Los Angeles. Richard, interesting analysis indeed. Thank you very much for joining us.

Now another top story we are following, Turkey has been hit by a number of recent attacks. And now a new bombing has rocked Istanbul. A suicide attacker struck this morning in an area known for its shops and cafes. Four people were killed in that attack, and many of the 36 wounded were foreign nationals. CNN's Arwa Damon was not far from the area where that blast happened. She joins us live now from Istanbul with the latest. So, Arwa, a main pedestrian thoroughfare in Istanbul, describe the scene for us from where you were.

DAMON: Well, we were about one or two hundred meters away and, by the time we got to the scene, the police had already created a small cordon. There were ambulances on site, and they very quickly began pushing people back. This is what they tend to do out of concern for secondary potential explosion, but also because the main priority is to try to evacuate the wounded. Thirty-six wounded is the updated number. At least 12 of them were foreign nationals. This is one of the main pedestrian thoroughfares. It is normally packed. It's filled with shops and cafes, restaurants, movie theatres, art galleries.

However, prior to this weekend, the Turkish authorities had already been warning individuals about a potential security threat. So the street was not necessarily as packed as it would have been, but still fairly crowded. The explosion happening around 10:30, 11:00 o'clock in the morning in front of one of the larger malls there on the corner of a, of a street that then leads you into a very charming alley that sells fish and other types of fresh produce. People right after the blast, some still clearly in shock, others running away, fleeing the scene, some trying to look figure out what happened. One woman who we saw later on was at the police cordon, begging the officer to let her through because her brother had been on Istikial and she hadn't been able to get through to him.

She didn't know what had happened to him. Now the heightened terror alert is because Turkey has seen a spate of bombings over the last few months since the summer really, facing threats from both ISIS and the Kurdish separatist group the PKK and its various offshoots, one of its offshoots that claimed responsibility for last Sunday's devastating attack in Ankara. In fact, the security threat had led the Germans to close their embassy, the consulate, and even their schools.

And we had also seen some other organization and institutions cancelling events that were meant to be happening this weekend. And it's really just underscoring at this stage how vulnerable Turkey is, how vulnerable the Turkish population does feel. A lot of people again, as I was saying, prior to this attack were avoiding certain areas to a relative degree. But at the same time, people don't want to be victims of terror threats. They don't want to allow terror and violence to reign and to win. But this, yet another strike that not only is ripping apart families and loved ones and relatives, but is also having a very severe understandable impact on the psyche of the Turkish population, Nick.

PARKER: Absolutely. Arwa Damon reporting live from Istanbul. Arwa, thank you for that.

Now both Belgian and France want a quick extradition for the Paris terrorist suspect, Salah Abdelslam, but his lawyer says not so fast. Coming up, Abdelslam's attorney reveals what is next for his client, plus history in the making. A sitting U.S. President will set foot in Cuba for the first time in decades. We will take you live to Havana, ahead of Barack Obama's trip. Stay with us.

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PARKER: Welcome back. Salah Abdelslam's lawyer says his client is cooperating with Belgian police and will refuse extradition to France. The 26-year-old was Europe's most wanted man in connection with last November's terrorist attacks in Paris. Abdelslam was captured on Friday in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek. Earlier Belgian's Prime Minister said his government would do its best to arrange for Abdelslam's extradition to France, quote as soon as possible. We go now to CNN's senior international correspondence, Frederik Pleitgen. He joins me from the Molenbeek neighborhood in Brussels with the latest. Fred, good to have you with us. So where do we see the process moving from here, do you think?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT, CNN, LONDON: Well, as the authorities said, the French want him to be extradited as quickly as possible and his lawyer came out earlier today and said that's not going to happen. He's going to what he calls refuse that extradition. It's actually an appeal to that extradition, to at least try and slow the process down somewhat. Now the other thing that's happening is that Abdelslam, after he was taken into custody earlier today, he was wounded. And so he was taken first to a hospital.

He's since then been discharged from that hospital. However, he still has a leg wound and so, therefore, at this point is in a bed, but he was already earlier today questioned by Belgian authorities, and then at a later time today he's going to be questioned again. Because on top of the Belgian arrest, the warrant that was out there, there's also a Europe-wide arrest warrant that was out for him as well. And so under that European arrest warrant, he will be questioned once again. And of course the authorities here are trying to find out a lot of information from Mr. Abdelslam. On the one hand more about the Paris attacks, about how they were planned, when they were planned, where they were planned, what sort of logistics was behind it.

But then also what sort of people he also had who were sheltering him, who were helping him, how big that web was. One of the things that French President Francois Hollande said yesterday at one of the first press conferences after it became clear that Salah Abdelslam had been arrested, the said that throughout the investigation it had become clear that many more people were involved in this than the authorities had originally thought. And of course that is something that is quite troubling for European law enforcement. In fact, just a couple of minutes ago we learned that there is a new decree that was put out by Interpol for all of its member nations to be on the lookout, because they believe that, with the arrest of Salah Abdelslam, there could be other potential operatives who might try to feel Europe, Nick.

PARKER: And, Fred, on that note, it is somewhat disturbing that Europe's most wanted man was able to hide out in the capital of Belgian for something like four months. Clearly there was a significant support network around him.

PLEITGEN: Yeah, clearly there was and clearly it is something where the authorities had been looking for him for four months. And you have to keep in mind it wasn't just the authorities looking, it was them also raiding places specifically in this area here in Molenbeek, but in other places in Belgian as well. There were raids sin France also. In total there were more than 100 raids in the past four months, many of them looking for Salah Abdelslam.

Now the key one that apparently took place was the one that happened on Tuesday, also here in Brussels, where in a raid on an apartment that authorities had actually believe was empty, they got into a fire fight. They shot and killed another operative who was connected to the Paris terror attacks, but they also found DNA, as well as fingerprints, from Salah Abdelslam, and that led, finally led them here. But you're absolutely right, it was quite troubling for the past four months to have the authorities looking for him, not finding him, and there was speculation that perhaps he might have fled to Syria. And then in the end he was found right here in the house that you see behind me, which is incidentally only about a block from where he grew up. Nick.

PARKER: Interesting. Fred Pleitgen reporting live for us from the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels. Fred, thank you for that. And still ahead, Cuba is rolling out the welcome mat for U.S. President Barack Obama. We will take you live to Havana, ahead of an historic trip. That's next.

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PARKER: Welcome back. Good to have you with us on CNN "Newsroom." Now U.S. President Barack Obama is set to arrive in Cuba on Sunday for an historic two-day trip. The island nation is preparing to welcome the first sitting President to visit in nearly, get this, 90 years, 90 years. Our Ed Lavandera joins me live now from Havana. Thank you for joining us. The media perhaps is sometimes prone to hyperbole, but this visit really is nothing short of momentous. I'm wondering what the atmosphere is like amongst the Cuban population after so many years, finally getting ready to welcome a sitting U.S. President.

ED LAVANDERA, CORRESPONDENT, CNN, DALLAS: Well, hello, Nick. And I don't think it's such a stretch at all to really consider the, the momentous occasion that this country is about to witness, and probably fair to say that on both sides of the Florida Straits, Cubans here on the island, as well as Cuban exiles throughout the United States, perhaps never dreamed that a moment like this would come during their lifetime.

So a great deal of attention. It is a trip that will be highly scrutinized on both sides of, of the issue and, and this dramatic moment seeing exactly what is going to unfold and how the moments between President Obama and Raul Castro will unfold here in Cuba as well. It's interesting, the paper here, the Communist newspaper, the state paper here in Havana this morning, the Granma, only mentioned two sentences about the visit of President Obama, although everyone here knows that he is on his way.

But it's interesting, it simply says that President Obama is coming, will meet with Raul Castro, and then says quote will do other activities. And of course some of those other activities include the one aspect that is obviously will be of tension between the United States and the Cuban government, and that is President Obama saying that he will be meeting with political activists and dissidents here in the island at some point during, during that visit. So those are the kinds of moments that will be highly scrutinized here over the next couple of days, Nick.

PARKER: Absolutely. Just two sentences, but two highly-significant one. Ed Lavandera reporting live from Havana. Thanks, Ed. CNN has spent decades reporting on news events in Cuba, and here's a look back at some of the biggest moments, through the eyes of the journalists who cover them.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's face it. I mean, Cuba is a beautiful country. Beautiful beaches, (inaudible). And the safeness. And the people. People make Cuba a gorgeous country.

JOURNALIST: During my trips there it was decided we wanted a bureau. So I was made the point person for opening a CNN bureau in Havana, and it took about seven years to do. One of the more interesting moments was during the Cuban rafting crisis and Janet Reno was the Attorney General here in the U.S., and she kept saying the crisis is over, the crisis is over. And I'm on the beach in Cuba dozens of Cubans are just continuing to pour into the sea. So we reported the crisis is not over. Our own people wouldn't believe us. So you had to take the camera and show them, here they come with their rafts, jumping into the ocean. It made us realize the importance of being there, just so people could see the whole picture of what was going on between the U.S. and Cuba.

JOURNALIST: I've been covering the Miami Cuban story for all this time. I've heard everything from the Miami Cuban exile community. It was my first time actually going into Cuba to see what it was actually like, what they had left, what they had fled from. It was like the clocked stopped in 1959. The Cold War had been over for years, but yet everybody was still living like the Cold War was going on.

JOURNALIST: One day we went with Ted Turner, which was a while ago, when he was going to interview Fidel Castro. And we got incredible access to the Cuban leader. We rode around Havana all day one day in Jeeps. The Jeeps kept breaking down, and we had to jump out of one Jeep and jump into another. And after a while, we all just said, boy, you know, if they can't even drive their leader around, maybe this isn't a place we should be scared of.