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75 Dead in a Crash Of a Russian Airbus On Hong Kong Run

75 Dead in a Crash Of a Russian Airbus On Hong Kong Run
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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March 23, 1994, Section A, Page 9Buy Reprints
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A Russian jetliner crashed in a remote forest in Siberia today, killing 75 people.

The state Emergency Committee said the Airbus A-310 apparently exploded and burned after crashing in the Kemerovskoi region, some 2,000 miles east of Moscow near the Mongolian border. The 63 passengers on the plane included 23 foreigners, most of them from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Britain.

There was no immediate word on why the plane crashed.

The aircraft was four hours into a 10-hour flight from Moscow to Hong Kong, said Vassili Tkachenko, Aeroflot's general manager in Hong Kong.

It took rescue workers several hours to reach the plane because they had to force their way through snow banks up to nine feet deep to reach the area, officials said.

A resident from a nearby village saw the plane burning in the forest and notified authorities, officials said. A helicopter later spotted the jet, and rescue workers and police reached the site several hours later.

The 183-seat plane disappeared from radar without sending a distress signal, Mr. Tkachenko said. But because air-traffic controllers saw it vanish from the screen they were able to pinpoint its location, he said.

Mr. Tkachenko said the plane was only 2 years old, and had between 5,000 and 7,000 flying hours.

Aeroflot leased a number of planes from Airbus to replace aging Soviet-era jets that were plagued by poor safety records and frequent accidents.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 9 of the National edition with the headline: 75 Dead in a Crash Of a Russian Airbus On Hong Kong Run. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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