An Armenian passenger plane carrying 113 people crashed in stormy weather early on Wednesday off Russia’s Black Sea coast as it was headed in for landing, killing everyone on board, emergency officials said.Armenian airline officials said they believed the crash was due to the stormy weather, but Sergei Kubinov, the head of the southern district office of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, said the age of the aircraft and technical factors could have been involved. Investigators did not believe terrorism was a factor.The Airbus A-320, which belonged to the Armenian airline Armavia, disappeared from radar screens just under 6 kilometres from the shore and crashed after making a turn and heading toward the Adler airport near Sochi, emergency situations ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said. Rescue officials in the Ministry’s southern regional branch said the 113 people aboard the plane, including six children, were killed.Wreckage from the plane was found not far from the shoreline, Beltsov said, and salvage workers said the fuselage was found at a depth of 450 metres.Search and rescue teams have pulled 18 bodies from the water. None were wearing life jackets, indicating they did not have sufficient warning to prepare for an emergency landing.Nineteen boats and divers were involved in the search,and a deep-sea robot was to be used to try to recover the plane’s black box, Beltsov said. The water temperature was 12 degrees Celsius.Russian President Vladimir Putin and Armenian President Robert Kocharian declared Friday a day of mourning in both countries, the Kremlin said.
