At least five people were killed when an airplane carrying 45 passengers and crew crash-landed in thick fog in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk on Wednesday night, Interfax news agency said.
The emergencies ministry said that the plane overshot the runway at Donetsk airport as it attempted to execute an emergency landing and broke up. The plane was carrying supporters to a European soccer match in eastern Ukraine. The Flight was chartered from the Black Sea coastal city of Odessa to Donetsk.
The small Soviet-designed AN-24 plane was operated by the small Southern Airlines company, which mostly runs domestic flights out of Odessa. The cause of the accident was not immediately clear and senior officials were dispatched to Donetsk to investigate. One of the survivors, a man in his 20s who identified himself by his first name, Oleg, said in a video interview posted on the Ukrainian news site Korrespondent that the plane “split open” and caught fire during landing. Many of the passengers escaped the burning plane through the break in the fuselage. Oleg said that according to preliminary information the crash could have been caused by engine failure during landing.
