Air crash in north-west Russia claims 44 lives
Forty-four people are now reported to have died in an air catastrophe in north-west Russia. Another eight have been taken to hospital with serious injuries. A Tu-134 airliner with 43 passengers and nine crew members on board was forced to make a crash landing near Petrozavodsk in Karelia in Russia’s north-west around midnight on Monday. The plane’s fuselage cracked on impact and burst into flames. The internal airliner was flying from Moscow to Petrozavodsk when it crash-landed on a highway some two kilometres from the runway at Petrozavodsk.
Rescuers have managed to extinguish the fire and rescue eight people, including one child, from the burning debris. All have been rushed to hospital in a state of shock with burns and multiple injuries. It has now been confirmed that the other 44 people on board have been killed. There are also reports that there were eight children among the passengers.
The Emergency Ministry says that at the moment the cause of the catastrophe could be anything from pilot error to a mechanical fault, or possibly heavy fog. A criminal case and investigation into the catastrophe have been opened. It has been reported that the black box recorders have now been recovered.
The Tupolev Tu-134 is a twin-engine airliner designed in the early 1960s in the USSR. The model has been in operation in more than 40 countries, but the largest fleet of Tu-134s is still in Russia.
In 2007 the Russian transport minister, Igor Levitin, called the Tu-134 an old and outdated airliner that needed to be replaced by the Sukhoi Superjet 100 or foreign equivalents within five years. There are 28 recorded crashes including this latest one for this model.
