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Divers Search For 113 People Killed In Crash Of Armenian Airliner

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  • Divers Search For 113 People Killed In Crash Of Armenian Airliner

    DIVERS SEARCH FOR 113 PEOPLE KILLED IN CRASH OF ARMENIAN AIRLINER
    Mike Eckel

    AP Worldstream
    May 03, 2006

    Divers searched storm-churned waters off Russia's Black Sea coast
    Wednesday, searching for the remains of 113 people who were killed
    when an Armenian passenger airliner crashed in rough weather as it
    was heading for a landing, emergency officials said.

    It was the worst air disaster in Armenia's recent history.

    Armenian airline officials said they believed the crash was due to the
    stormy weather, and Russian Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman
    Viktor Beltsov said that this was considered the likeliest cause. He
    said that the clouds were as low as 100 meters (330 feet) above the
    ground at the time of the crash.

    Earlier, Russian officials said that 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 kilometers (3.7 miles)
    from the shore and crashed after making a turn and heading toward the
    Adler airport near the Russian resort of Sochi, Beltsov said. Rescue
    officials in the ministry's southern regional branch said the 105
    passengers and eight crew members aboard the plane flying from the
    Armenian capital Yerevan, including six children, were all killed.

    Gurgen Seroboyan, whose 23-year-old fiancee Lucenie Gevorkian was a
    flight attendant on the flight, wept as he waited at Yerevan airport
    for a charter flight that was to take relatives of the crash victims
    to Sochi.

    Samvel Oganesian said his 23-year-old son Vram and his friend Hamlet
    Abgarian had been heading to Sochi for vacation.

    "Why did he go?" Oganesian asked in anguish, over and over again.

    In Sochi's airport, about 100 tearful relatives _ nearly all
    Armenians _ kept up an anguished vigil in a waiting hall. One man
    became hysterical and had to be taken away by ambulance.

    Women, sobbing, held handkerchiefs to their mouths, while men sat
    silently, their heads in their hands.

    Aram Sargasian, 22, said he had two uncles on the ill-fated plane
    who had been heading to Sochi for a weeklong vacation. The city has
    a large ethnic Armenian population.

    "I adored them. This is all like a dream," he said, shaking his head.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin and Armenian President Robert
    Kocharian declared Friday a day of mourning in both countries, the
    Kremlin said.

    Wreckage from the plane was found not far from the shoreline, Beltsov
    said, and Sergei Kudinov, the head of the southern district office
    of the Emergency Situations Ministry, said the fuselage was found at
    a depth of 400 meters (1,300 feet).

    Search and rescue teams have pulled 33 bodies from the water,
    regional emergency officials said; none was wearing a life jacket,
    indicating they did not have sufficient warning to prepare for an
    emergency landing.

    The airline said that 26 Russians, one Ukrainian and one Georgian
    were among the passengers. The rest were Armenian citizens.

    Twenty-five boats as well as divers were involved in the search,
    and a deep-sea robot was to be used to try to recover the plane's
    black box, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. But a Russian
    aviation official, Rudolf Teymurazov of the Intergovernmental Aviation
    Committee, expressed doubt the black boxes could be found since some
    parts of the plane could be as deep as 2 kilometers (1 mile).

    "If the black boxes are located not in some segment of the plane,
    but on the (sea) bottom, then it will be impossible to find them,"
    the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted him as saying.

    The water temperature was 12 degrees Celsius (53 F).

    The plane broke up on impact with the water and passengers' personal
    belongings and plane fragments were found scattered over an area
    spreading 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) from the crash site.

    Rough seas, driving rain and low visibility were hampering the search,
    Russian news agencies reported.

    Beltsov said the plane, which disappeared from radar screens at about
    2:15 a.m. (2215 GMT Tuesday, went down while trying to make a repeat
    attempt at an emergency landing. However, the Interfax news agency
    quoted the Russian air control agency as saying that the plane's crew
    had not declared any emergency.

    Armavia deputy commercial director Andrei Agadzhanov said in Yerevan
    that the crew had communicated with Sochi ground controllers while
    the plane was flying over the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. The ground
    controllers said the weather was poor but the plane could still land,
    the representative said. Just before the landing, however, the ground
    controllers told the crew to make another circle in the air before
    approaching the airport.

    He said the crew was highly experienced, the airplane was in good
    condition and that weather conditions were "certainly" the cause.

    The Airbus A-320 was manufactured in 1995 and had been acquired on
    leasing by the airline. The aircraft underwent full-scale servicing
    a year ago.

    Agadzhanov said that the airline's deputy general director, Vyacheslav
    Yaralov, had been aboard.

    Investigators from the airline and Armenian and French aviation
    authorities were to fly to the crash scene later Wednesday morning.

    Armavia is Armenia's largest airline. It is 70-percent owned by
    Russia's second-largest airline Sibir, and it acquired routes from
    Armenian Airlines and Armenian International Airlines when those
    operations fell into financial troubles.

    ________

    AP reporters Avet Demourian in Yerevan, Armenia, and Sergei Venyavsky
    in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, contributed to this story.
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