RUSSIA AIR CRASH RELATIVES IDENTIFY BODIES
By Mikhail Antonov
Reuters, UK
May 4 2006
SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) – Relatives began the grim task on Thursday of
identifying bodies of some of the 113 passengers and crew killed when
their Armenian airliner crashed into the Black Sea off Russia’s coast.
In Sochi, the Russian holiday resort near where the Airbus A-320
crashed, a crowd of about 60 people gathered outside the morgue to
examine photographs of corpses hanging on a wall.
Most showed battered faces but some corpses were too disfigured. One
photograph showed only a man’s hand with a ring on one finger. Anyone
who recognised a relative was ushered inside the morgue to view
the body.
“People are, of course, in shock. It is an enormous stress for them,”
said Yuri Meditsa, a psychologist who was assigned to counsel grieving
relatives at the morgue.
“There are bodies that can be identified and there are some that,
realistically, cannot,” he said.
There were at least five children on the plane which took off from
the Armenian capital Yerevan early on Wednesday bound for Sochi’s
airport. Most of the passengers were Armenian. There were 26 Russian
passport holders on board.
A day and a half after the jet vanished from radar screens, divers
and rescue workers in boats had pulled 49 bodies from the water,
officials said. Twenty of the dead had been identified.
The first bodies will be flown home to Armenia later on Thursday for
burial, Armenian government minister Hovik Abrahamiyan said in Yerevan.
Russia air crash relatives identify bodies Thu May 4, 2006 2:52 PM
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search was going on for more bodies and for the aircraft’s “black box”
flight recorder which should help investigators piece together the
jet’s last moments.
Crash investigators had picked up a radio tracking signal from one of
the black boxes lying on the seabed, said Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman
for Russia’s Emergencies Ministry.
Investigators and officials from Armavia, the airline operating the
plane, said they believed torrential rain and poor visibility were
factors in the crash. Russian prosecutors have ruled out terrorism.
Armavia’s managers said the aircraft had initially turned back to
Yerevan because weather conditions in Sochi made it impossible to land.
The crew changed course again and tried to land at Sochi a second time
when flight controllers told them the weather had cleared slightly,
the airline said.
FINAL MINUTES
There was a haunting glimpse into the flight’s final minutes on
Thursday when the Rossiya television station broadcast what it said
was a taped radio exchange between the crew and air traffic controllers
in neighbouring Georgia.
“We are returning to Yerevan,” a crew member can be heard saying over
a crackly radio link.
“Right now or later?” the controller asks.
“Now,” the crew member replied.
A special submersible was despatched to Sochi to help retrieve some
of the debris which, rescuers say, has sunk to the seabed about 500
metres (1,600 feet) down.
Russian television showed a rescuer picking up a single, white training
shoe from the water and adding it to a pile of clothes and shredded
suitcases on the deck of his dinghy.
(Additional reporting by Hasmik Mkrtchian in Yerevan and Nataliya
Borisova in Moscow)