Russia air crash relatives identify bodies

By Mikhail Antonov

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 recognized 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.

The 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 neighboring 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 dispatched to Sochi to help
retrieve some of the debris which, rescuers say, has sunk to
the seabed about 500 meters (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)