ARMENIAN JET CRASH KILLS 113
By Nikolai Isayev

Metro Toronto, Canada
May 3 2006

SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) – All 113 passengers and crew on board an
Armenian airliner were killed on Wednesday when the plane crashed into
the Black Sea off the Russian coast in heavy rain and disintegrated.

Investigators blamed the bad weather. The Airbus A-320 had been trying
to land at Sochi, a popular holiday spot in southern Russia.

Russian prosecutors ruled out a bomb.

Rescue workers in motorized dinghies criss-crossed heaving seas to
search for survivors but an Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman said
preliminary information was that everyone on board was dead. The
plane was carrying at least five children.

By evening at least 46 bodies had been retrieved from the water,
along with dozens of body parts.

Rescue workers used boat hooks to pull jagged bits of fuselage from
the water. Pieces of foam and fabric from the aircraft’s seats were
piled up on the quayside at Sochi’s port.

The plane, operated by Armavia, had been making a short flight of
about an hour from the Armenian capital Yerevan. Most of the passengers
were Armenian nationals.

Some passengers’ relatives, hoping to collect the victims’ bodies and
bring them home, had arrived at Sochi’s airport on board a special
flight from Yerevan organized by the airline. A second plane of
relatives was on its way to Sochi.

Mostly men, they huddled around a list of victims posted on a
noticeboard in the airport terminal.

VANISHED FROM RADAR

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said 26 of the passengers were Russian
passport holders and almost all the rest were Armenians.

“I was waiting for a call from my mother that she had arrived okay.

But she didn’t phone, so I phoned myself and heard that this accident
had happened,” said Khapet Tadevosyan, 32, at Yerevan airport.

“She flew to Sochi to see her sisters, whom she hadn’t seen for 15
years,” he said.

A spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry said the plane vanished from
radar screens at 2:15 a.m. (2215 GMT Tuesday) near Sochi, which lies
close to the Georgian border.

“A terrorist act is completely ruled out,” Natalia Vishnyakova, a
spokesman for Russia’s Prosecutor General, said on Rossiya television.

An Armavia official said the aircraft had initially been refused
permission to land because of torrential rain, but airport officials
changed their minds.

The crash happened as the crew made a second approach.

“Our initial information is that the only cause was the weather,
for example poor visibility,” said Gayane Davtsian, a spokeswoman
for Armenia’s state aviation authority.

A day of mourning was declared in Armenia, a mountainous state of 3
million people, many of whom have relatives in southern Russia.

Television stations cleared their schedules and were playing somber
music.

Airbus said it would be sending six specialists to help authorities
with the crash investigation.

Attempts to pin down the cause of the crash were hampered by rain
and the fact that most of the plane had sunk to the seabed.

“The main parts of the plane are located at a depth of around 400
meters (1,300 feet),” Emergencies Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov
said.

The Airbus A-320, a twin-engined aircraft that seats 150 passengers,
entered service in 1988.

(Additional reporting by Hasmik Lazarian in Yerevan and Jason Neely
in London)

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress