DUSHANBE, September 15, 2008, Asia-Plus — There are no Tajik nationals among victims of Perm air crash, the Tajik Ambassador to Russia, Mr. Abdulmjid Dostiyev said.
We will recall that a passenger plane en route from Moscow crashed on a rail line in the outskirts of the Urals city of Perm early on Sunday killing all 88 people on board including seven children and 21 foreign nationals. According to Russia’s RIA Novosti, Eyewitnesses in a nearby residential area said the Boeing-737-500 caught fire while airborne, at around 5:15 a.m. local time.
The plane, owned by Russian flagship air carrier Aeroflot, was carrying 82 passengers and six crew members, the airline and the emergencies ministry said.
Aeroflot said the passengers on Flight 821 included seven children, and “foreign citizens including nine from Azerbaijan, five from Ukraine, and one from each of France, Switzerland, Latvia, the United States, Germany, Turkey and Italy.”
Investigators have yet to ascertain the cause of the disaster, but a police source in Perm said the crash could have been caused by one of the plane”s engines catching fire and failing.
Russian Transportation Minister Igor Levitin, who is heading the government commission investigating the catastrophe, told RIA Novosti that the plane”s black boxes had been found and passed on to experts. “The flight data recorders have been found, and handed over to the Interstate Aviation Committee [of 12 ex-Soviet states], which will decode it,” he said.
The Perm Territory”s emergencies ministry department has published a list of those killed in the crash, which includes Col. Gen. Gennady Troshev, 61, a former commander of the North Caucasus Military District. The youngest of those on the passenger list is a nine-year-old girl, Yana Kuznetsova.
The disaster is Russia”s worst since Pulkovo Flight 612, which crashed in eastern Ukraine on August 22, 2006 en route from the Russian Black Sea resort of Anapa to St. Petersburg, killing all 160 passengers and 10 crew.
The Boeing 737-500 was launched in 1987, and entered service in 1990. The plane is highly popular among Russian airlines, which often buy second-hand models to replace Soviet-built airliners.
The Boeing 737 is the most-used and most-produced passenger jet in the world. The earliest variants of the jetliner entered service in 1968.
The most recent accident in the post Soviet space involving a Boeing 737 was on August 24, when a Boeing 737-200 crashed in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, killing at least 65 people.
