Investigators recovered flight recorders from the charred wreckage of a Russian airliner on Wednesday as grief-stricken families prepared to travel to the site to identify remains.
Relatives of the 170 victims, who included 45 children under 12, are due to fly out from Pulkovo airport in St Petersburg to the scene of the crash, 45km north of the Ukrainian city of Donetsk.
Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin said officials were also examining recordings of conversations between the pilots and a Ukrainian air-traffic control post in Kharkiv.
Russian prosecutors, who have opened a criminal inquiry into a possible ”violation of safety rules”, are at the scene of the crash and have begun photographing remains of the victims.
Officials quoted by Ukrainian media said dozens of bodies had been recovered. Wreckage was scattered over a wide area in the surrounding swamp, where plane parts and the land lay scorched.
An Agence France-Presse reporter at the scene saw a dozen black plastic body bags containing victims’ remains placed onto stretchers by emergency workers and lined up along the ground near the crash site.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yushchenko spoke about the crash late on Tuesday and have declared days of mourning in Ukraine on Wednesday and in Russia on Thursday.
”In the name of all the Ukrainian people, President Viktor Yushchenko expressed his sincerest condolences to Russian President Vladimir Putin,” Yushchenko’s office said in a statement.
Vasily Nalyotenko, a spokesperson for jet owners Pulkovo airlines, told reporters in St Petersburg that the crash victims included five Western nationals from Finland, France, Germany and The Netherlands.
A French embassy spokesperson in Moscow confirmed that a French woman was among the victims.
The plane, a Tupolev-154 jet, was on a flight from the Russian Black Sea coast city of Anapa to St Petersburg when it ran into severe weather, officials said.
”We don’t know the actual reason for the crash but the weather conditions were very bad. There were thunderstorms, gusts of wind, hail,” Mykola Kulbida, head of Ukraine’s weather service, was quoted by Interfax as saying.
The jet was flying at an altitude of 10 000m when it was forced to make an emergency landing. Ukrainian officials said the crew had declared a fire on board before the plane went down.
Ukraine’s Transport Minister Mykola Rudkovski said the plane had requested authorisation to fly 20km to the east of its planned route, Interfax said.
”That permission was given. It’s difficult at the moment to establish the causes of the accident but we can see the influence of a cyclone,” Rudkovski was quoted as saying.
Irina Andrinovna, spokesperson for Russia’s emergency situations ministry, was quoted by Interfax on Tuesday as saying that the crash occurred ”as the result of a lightning strike as the plane flew into a storm front”.
Igor Krol, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian emergency situations ministry, said the plane’s landing gear then failed to deploy normally and the aircraft crashed ”on its belly”.
Nalyotenko said Pulkovo airlines will continue with regular flights. The spokesperson said the plane was built in 1992 and conformed fully to safety regulations.
A tri-engine jet similar in size and construction to a Boeing 727, the Tupolev-154 can carry about 180 passengers and has been used as a workhorse of civil aviation fleets in Russia and other former Soviet states.
Anapa, located along the same stretch of Black Sea coast as the better-known resort city Sochi, is a popular holiday destination for many Russians. — Sapa-AFP