RUSSIA: All 113 passengers and crew on board an Armenian airliner were killed yesterday when the aircraft crashed into the Black Sea off the Russian coast in heavy rain and disintegrated.
Investigators blamed the bad weather. The Airbus A-320 had been trying to land at Sochi, a popular holiday spot in southern Russia. Russian prosecutors ruled out a bomb.
Rescue workers in motorised dinghies searched the rough seas for survivors but an emergencies ministry spokeswoman said preliminary information was that everyone on board was dead. The plane was carrying at least five children.
By evening at least 46 bodies had been recovered from the water, along with dozens of body parts.
Rescue workers used boat hooks to pull jagged bits of fuselage from the water. Pieces of foam and fabric from the aircraft's seats were piled up on the quayside at Sochi's port.
The aircraft, operated by Armavia, had been making a short flight of about an hour from the Armenian capital Yerevan. Most of the passengers were Armenian nationals.
Some passengers' relatives, hoping to collect the victims' bodies and bring them home, had arrived at Sochi's airport on board a special flight from Yerevan organised by the airline. Mostly men, they huddled around a list of victims posted on a notice board in the airport terminal.
Russia's foreign ministry said 26 passengers were Russian passport holders and almost all the rest were Armenians.
"I was waiting for a call from my mother that she had arrived okay. But she didn't phone, so I phoned myself and heard that this accident had happened," said Khapet Tadevosyan (32), at Yerevan airport. "She flew to Sochi to see her sisters, whom she hadn't seen for 15 years," he said.
"A terrorist act is completely ruled out," Natalia Vishnyakova, a spokesman for Russia's prosecutor general, said on television.
An Armavia official said the aircraft had initially been refused permission to land because of torrential rain, but airport officials changed their minds. The crash happened as the crew made a second approach.
A day of mourning was declared in Armenia. Airbus said it would be sending six specialists to help authorities with the crash investigation.