43 dead as ice hockey team’s plane crashes

A PLANE carrying a Russian ice hockey team to a season-opening match crashed after takeoff from a provincial airport, with 43 people feared dead.

The crash of the Yak-42 aircraft, whose passengers included players and coaches of a team that includes foreign stars, plunged Russia’s sports world into grief and marred a political forum featuring President Dmitry Medvedev.

The plane was carrying 37 passengers and eight crew to Minsk in Belarus when it crashed a few kilometres from the airport at Tunoshna outside Yaroslavl, 250km north of Moscow, the emergencies ministry said.

Russian news agency Interfax, citing an official at state aviation agency, Rosaviatsia, said that the plane had trouble gaining altitude and hit an antenna beyond the runway.

Interfax cited a security official as saying the plane caught fire after the crash.

The ministry said two people survived and were taken to hospital.

“There has been a terrible tragedy,” KHL president Alexander Medvedev said after the opening match of the league’s season in the city of Ufa was interrupted by news of the crash. He announced a minute’s silence and postponed the match.

There was no immediate word on the identity of the victims.

At the scene, a broken piece of the plane’s light-blue fuselage lay half-submerged in a river on the edge of Tunoshna.

The crash was Russia’s deadliest since June, when a Tupolev Tu-134 jet slammed into a roadside while trying to land in fog in the northern Russian city of Petrozavodsk, killing 45 people.

In April 2010, Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s Russian-built plane crashed near the western city of Smolensk in a thick fog, killing him and all 95 others on board.