A Russian airliner crash-landed in the central Russian city of Samara on Saturday, killing seven people and injuring 23, emergency officials said.
Authorities gave conflicting accounts about what caused the incident. Emergency Situations Ministry spokesperson Irina Andrianova said the plane grazed the runway with one of its wings as it tried to land in heavy fog.
But prosecutors who were investigating the crash cited possible pilot error, and said in a statement that the plane touched down too early, landing about 400m before the start of the runway.
The Russian airline UTAir, which owned the Tu-134 plane, said there were 57 people on board, including seven crew members. Two of the crew were among the injured, it said in a statement.
Andrianova said seven people were killed, 23 were injured and hospitalised — six of them in serious condition — and the rest of the people on board were receiving psychological help. Earlier, officials had said 51 people had been injured, but they revised the figure to 23, explaining that the others were being treated for psychological shock.
Some Russian media, citing local emergency officials, reported that the plane landed on its fuselage after the landing gear failed to come down.
Emergency officials said they had retrieved the plane’s flight recorders and would study them to determine what led to the crash, the Interfax news agency reported.
The plane had been en route from Surgut, 2 200km east of Moscow, to the western city of Belgorod with a stop in Samara, a Volga River city about 900km south-east of Moscow.
Tu-134s are widely used in the former Soviet Union. The last major crash of a Russian airliner was on August 22, when a Tu-154 of Pulkovo Airlines crashed in Ukraine, killing all 170 people aboard.
In July, an Airbus-310 of S7 airlines went off the runway after landing in Irkutsk, smashed into adjacent buildings and caught fire, killing 123 of the 203 people aboard. In May, an Armenian Airbus-320 crashed into the Black Sea while trying to land in the southern Russian city of Sochi, killing all 113 people aboard. — Sapa-AP