By Xinhua,
Moscow : All 88 people aboard a passenger plane were killed when it crashed in Russia’s Ural region, Russian news agencies reported Sunday, quoting emergency ministry sources.
The Boeing-737 jet went down at about 3.00 a.m. Sunday into a patch of wasteland on the outskirts of the Russian city of Perm in the central Ural mountains, the Itar-Tass news agency said.
“The plane took off from Moscow to Perm at 0110 Moscow time Sunday and in two hours, as it was approaching to land, communication with ground control was lost at an altitude of 1,800 meters,” Itar-Tass quoted a spokesperson of the country’s emergency ministry.
The plane, operated by Russia’s Aeroflot airline, was believed to have caught fire midair, spokesperson Irina Andrianova said.
Several hundreds of rescuers were working on the outskirts of Perm, about 1,200 km east of Moscow, the spokesperson said.
The cause of the accident was not immediately known yet.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered Transport Minister Igor Levitin to set up a commission to investigate the cause of the crash, the Kremlin press service said.
The latest crash of a Boeing-737 aircraft occurred near Bishkek, capital of the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan last month in which 64 people were killed.