Plane crashes in Russia, killing 88 people  

A Russian Aeroflot Boeing 737-500 airliner crashed near the Ural Mountains on Sunday, killing all 88 passengers and crew on board -- 21 of them foreign nationals."The Boeing-737 carried 82 passengers on board, including seven children, and six crew... All passengers were killed," Aeroflot said in a statement."There are foreign citizens among the victims, including nine from Azerbaijan, five from Ukraine, and one each from France, Switzerland, Latvia, the United States, Germany, Turkey and Italy," the statement said.Debris from the crash covered a section of Russia's main east-west railway, forcing its closure, Russian media reported.

Television pictures showed firefighters walking round the smoldering, shattered remains of the plane.Investigators were flying from Moscow to try and establish what caused the crash but there was no suggestion of an attack or sabotage."It was burning while still in the sky and it looked like a falling comet," a female eyewitness told Russia's Vesti-24 television channel."As the plane was coming in for landing, it lost communication at the height of 1,100 meters (yards) and air controllers lost its blip. The airplane was found within Perm's city limits completely destroyed and on fire," the Aeroflot statement said.Earlier, investigator Vladimir Markin was quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency as saying that the airplane "fell into a ravine near the city limits."Aeroflot set up a crisis center for the victims' relatives both in Moscow's Sheremetyevo-1 airport and in Perm, including psychological aid, the company said.Last year, 33 Russian aviation accidents left 318 dead -- a sixfold increase over 2005 -- raising serious concerns about Russia's civil aviation, with experts pointing to major faults in the professional training of crews as well as Russia's ageing fleet of passenger jets.An air safety commission announced in January that the average age of the country's international airliners was 18, and its regional jets 30 years.