88 killed in Russian plane crash

MOSCOW: A Russian passenger jet crashed on Sunday near the Ural Mountains in the western Perm city after one of its engines apparently caught fire as it attempted to land, killing all 88 people on board, including 21 foreigners.
    
The Aeroflot airlines' Boeing 737, which was on a flight from Moscow to Perm, crashed just a few metres away from the residential buildings.
    
One of its engines apparently caught fire while the plane was approaching the local airport for landing around 3 am local time (4:30 am IST), the media reports said.
    
Eyewitnesses told Vesti channel that before crashing the ill-fated jet, glowing like a comet, tried to make an emergency landing on the railway tracks.
    
All 88 people aboard  -- 82 passengers and six crew members -- died in the crash. Among those killed were 21 foreigners and seven children, the reports said.
     
The dead included nine from Azerbaijan, five from Ukraine and one each from France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, and Turkey. One passenger was also said to be an American but it was not officially confirmed, they said.
    
"I felt an explosion, it threw me off the bed...," an unidentified woman in Perm was quoted as saying by Vesti-24 TV. "It (the plane) was burning while still in the sky and it looked like a falling comet."
    
The debris of the plane were strewn over an area of 10,000 square metres and had blocked the world's longest Trans-Siberian railway linking Moscow with Vladivostok in the sector, according to the reports.
    
Russian emergency situations Minister Sergei Shoigu was quoted as saying by TV channels that the two flight recorders of the plane had been found and were being sent for investigating the cause of the crash.