Moscow - Rescue workers pulled 10 bodies yesterday from the wreckage of a Russian aircraft that crashed on a flight from the Siberian far north to Moscow with 27 people on board, the emergencies ministry said. More than 100 rescue workers were dispatched to the site of the crash about 20 km from the village of Kalyazin, in the Tver region, north of Moscow. All 27 people on board the plane were presumed dead after the Ilyushin IL-18 turboprop aircraft crashed four-and-a-half hours into its flight to Moscow from the far north town of Khatanga.
The Krasnoyarsk transport chief, Mr Viktor Ossipov, said he could not rule out the possibility that an act of terrorism may have caused the crash but said this was one of many leads being investigated. The Russian defence ministry, meanwhile, dismissed the possibility that the aircraft had been hit by a missile, like the Russian Tu-154 passenger aircraft accidentally downed by a Ukrainian ground-to-air missile last month.