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Passenger plane crashes
03/05/2006 07:20 - (SA)
Moscow - An Armenian airliner carrying 113
people crashed into the sea in heavy rain off Russia's southern
coast on Wednesday, and rescue workers were retrieving bodies at
the site, officials and local media said.
There was no sign of survivors, they said.
A spokesperson for the emergencies ministry told local news
agencies rescue workers had found baggage, life jackets, body
parts, pieces of the shattered plane and a patch of oil floating
on the Black Sea at the site of the crash.
The agencies said 11 bodies had been found by 03:00 GMT and
that most of the passengers on the plane, which had been coming
in to land after the short flight from the Armenian capital
Yerevan, had characteristically Armenian surnames.
Attempted emergency landing
"The fragments were found 6km from the shore
near the airport of Adler. The search operation continues,"
Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said.
Beltsov said the plane was an Airbus 320 and had vanished
from radar screens at 02:15 near Sochi, a
Russian holiday resort near the Georgian border that has been
popular with top officials since Soviet times.
An official from Armavia, the Armenian airline that owned
the plane, said it had initially been refused permission to land
because of the heavy rain, but then the airport had changed its
mind and said the landing could go ahead.
"The plane was in an ideal technical condition, the crew was
well qualified," Andrei Aghajanov, deputy commercial director of
the airline, told Reuters.
The plane had attempted an emergency landing at the airport,
and had crashed into the sea at a very steep angle. Its fuselage
was lying on the seabed at a depth of 300m.
Armavia is the largest airline in the former Soviet Republic
of Armenia and has three Airbus 320s of the kind that crashed.
The plane was carrying at least five children and eight crew
members. Heavy rain and poor visibility were complicating the
search for survivors.
Adler is the name of the region of Sochi that houses the
town's airport.
(Additional reporting by Hasmik Mkrtchyan in Yerevan)
- Reuters
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