Russia: Russian officials say brake failure may have caused an Airbus jet to veer off a runway and crash in Siberia yesterday, killing at least 122 people.
The jet, a Sibir Airlines Airbus A310, landed in wet conditions at Irkutsk airport. It failed to stop and overshot the runway, ploughed in to a concrete wall and exploded.
Russian media quoted an unnamed official saying preliminary examinations indicated the brakes had failed as the jet landed on the rain-soaked runway.
Survivors, many suffering from burns, broke open doors at the rear of the aircraft and leapt to the ground as the plane caught fire.
Local hospitals treated 57 wounded, including six children aged from three to 13 who had been on their way to a vacation at nearby Lake Baikal.
Officials said they expected the death toll to rise, with 25 people still unaccounted for.
It is the second fatal crash this year in Russia involving an airbus. Last May, all 113 on board an Armavia Airlines Airbus A320 died when it crashed into the Black Sea near the resort of Sochi.
With Russia in the world spotlight ahead of this weekend's G8 summit in St Petersburg, President Vladimir Putin put transport minister Igor Levitin in personal charge of the investigation.
Mr Levitin said the flight data and the cockpit voice recorder were recovered from the wreck. Airbus investigators are due to fly out to Russia to examine the data recordings and study the wreckage.
Officials say some of the survivors who escaped the burning plane apparently wandered off, and radio stations were last night appealing for them to come forward and be identified.
The jet, flying from Moscow, arrived at Irkutsk at 8am. It is reported to have made no distress call prior to landing. The plane appeared to lose control as it touched down - it left the runway, hit a concrete partition and buried itself in buildings close to the airport perimeter.
The crew and most at the front of the plane appear to have been killed in the blast. Survivors further back described the chaos as they fought through smoke, tangled metal and bodies to break open the rear doors.
"It was terrible, really terrible because people were shouting, people were on fire," survivor Margarita Svetlova told Russian television. "Someone shouted that it was all going to blow up so I ran out of fear."
Sibir, Russia's second-biggest airline, said the plane, built in 1983, was in good shape and had been inspected the day before the crash. It said the pilot had more than 900 flying hours.
This is the third Sibir jet to have been involved in a fatal crash since 2001.
In October 2001, a Sibir Tupolev TU-154 crashed over the Black Sea with the loss of all 77 on board after being hit by a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile fired during a training exercise.
And in August 2004, a bomb destroyed another Sibir Tupolev, one of two airliners brought down in the same day by Chechen suicide bombers.
Irkutsk airport was the scene of another fatal crash in July 2001, when a Tuplolev spiralled out of control as it came in to land, hitting the ground and exploding with the loss of all 145 aboard.
Investigators will want to know why, despite the brake failure, the plane was unable to use reverse thrust to slow down.
Russia's airline industry has been plagued with problems following the privatisation of parts of the former Aeroflot monopoly, with small regional airlines, nicknamed "Babyflots", short of cash and relying on outdated planes.
However, their safety record is good, with fewer than a dozen crashes in the past 10 years.