Rescue work hit by rough weather

According to the ministry for emergency situations in Moscow, at least 74 residents of the building’s 108 registered tenants survived. Spokesman Nikolai Shermenkov did not say if they were in the building at the time of the crash.

The death toll was expected to rise as rescue workers continued to search the debris in the aftermath of one of Russia’s worst air disasters.

The jumbo jet-sized aircraft was carrying 23 people when it plummeted to the ground 20 seconds after taking off from an airport near Irkutsk, Shermenkov said on Sunday. Officials said they didn’t know the cause but hoped to learn it from the plane’s black box, which was recovered and sent to Moscow immediately. Firefighters battled a blaze that raced through the building complexes overnight, and some fires continued to burn on Sunday. Orange-clad rescue workers spent the night pulling ice-encased airplane parts out of the building wreckage and began a more extensive search for survivors or victims at daylight.

Overnight temperatures dropped under -20 degrees celsius in Irkutsk, a city of 7,00,000 located five time zones east of Moscow and just west of Lake Baikal, one of the world’s largest lakes.

Television footage showed the giant tail of the aircraft, jutting into the sky above a devastated apartment block. Surrounding buildings and cars were gutted by fire.

“I thought somebody was shooting,” said one distraught woman interviewed by NTV television. “I only saw the plane moving slowly to the ground without a sound, one wing lower than the other. I heard a bang and I thought, why didn’t it fly higher?”

The cold slowed the operation and left authorities unclear about the number of dead or injured.

More than 1,400 firefighters, soldiers and members of professional rescue squads, assisted by sniffer dogs, searched for survivors in buildings surrounding the crash site.

Thirteen people, including 8 children, were hospitalised with severe burns following the crash.

The plane had about 100 tons of fuel in its tanks when it crashed, and the resulting explosion and fire enveloped the area in flames, according to local officials. The remains of the crew and people killed on the ground were charred, they said.

The crash happened at about 2 pm (local time), when many residents were out doing weekend shopping, averting a higher death toll, officials said.

Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, appointed by President Boris Yeltsin to head the investigation into the crash, arrived in Irkutsk on Sunday morning to oversee the rescue operation.

Russia and other nations of the former Soviet Union have been plagued by a series of deadly air crashes in recent years. Experts have blamed poor maintenance, safety violations and cost-cutting for persistent problems.