Grieving Russians carrying flowers and photographs of their loved ones on Thursday visited the site in Germany where two planes came down after colliding in mid-air, leaving 71 dead, most of them children.
"I am bringing her a bouquet of her favorite flowers," said Mr Batyr Khismatulin, the weeping father of one of the 52 children who perished in the crash.
The relatives flew in from the Urals republic of Bashkortostan on a Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev 154 identical to the aircraft on which members of their families died in Monday's collision.
Accompanied by teams of interpreters and counsellors, and carrying medical records and other items to help identify the victims, they boarded buses bound for the crash site near Lake Constance on the Swiss border.
Some brought handfuls of earth to spread at the crash site.
"The intense emotion raised by this catastrophe in Bashkortostan is comparable to September 11th," said Russian deputy prime minister Mr Nikolai Sigakov.
Most of the dead children were students being rewarded for good grades with a trip to the seaside in Spain.
"We are planning a visit to the site where the wreckage is," a police spokesman said, "but we want to avoid any chance that the families will confront the bodies of their loved ones."
"We are also thinking, in consultation with the Russian delegation, about the possibility of giving the families some of the personal effects found at the site," the spokesman said.
Police said the bodies of 67 of the 71 people killed had been found and that about 600 people were combing a 19-mile radius from where the planes came down in an effort to find other remains.
Only those of the two people aboard the DHL Boeing 757 cargo plane, a Briton and a Canadian flying the aircraft, had been identified so far.
AFP