Eight foreigners, including an Australian and a Briton, were among 23 people killed when a passenger plane crashed in Azerbaijan shortly after take-off, an employee at Baku airport said Saturday, according to DPA. Debris from the Antonov-140 plane were found 35 kilometres north- east of the capital Baku on the coast of the Caspian Sea. The search for the plane's black boxes was hindered by heavy rain at the crash site, police said. There were 18 passengers and five crew members aboard the AZAL airlines flight which took off at 10:19 p.m. local time (1819 GMT) from Baku for Aktau, Kazakhstan. The plane disappeared from radar screens eight minutes after take- off, a spokesman for Azerbaijan's transport authority told Russian news agency RIA-Novosti. The pilot was very experienced, the director general of AZAL said. A commission is to investigate the cause of the crash. The Ukrainian-made Antonov-140-100 model is only one year old, can carry up to 52 passengers and has a flight range of up to 2,420 kilometres. Some 13 of the twin-propeller aircraft are currently in use worldwide. On the same day three years ago, an Antonov-140 crashed in Iran, killing 45 people. An AZAL airlines Tupolev-134 crashed on December 5, 1996, killed 52 people.
