Portrait of Vitali Kaloyev smoking at home in Vladikavkaz, in North Ossetia in southern Russia.
The 52-year-old architect, who killed the air traffic controller blamed for the plane crash in which he lost his wife and two children, is being treated as a national hero.
Kaloyev, who was freed November 2007 from a Swiss jail after serving less than four years, was appointed deputy construction minister for his home region.
Kaloyev was building a holiday villa in Spain for a wealthy Russian when his wife Svetlana, 44, 10-year-old son Konstantin and four-year-old daughter Diana, set out to join him for a holiday in July 2002. As their plane flew over Germany it collided with a cargo jet killing all 71 people on board, most of them Russian schoolchildren.
Investigators later established that Peter Nielsen, a Dane working for Skyguide, the Swiss air-traffic control service at Zurich airport, was the only person on duty. He had panicked when he realised the two planes were on a collision course and gave wrong instru