At least seven people were killed and around 40 seriously wounded Saturday when a Russian passenger jet crash-landed in the city of Samara on the Volga river, officials said, according to dpa. Authorities in the city said that the pilot of the Tupolev-134 had brought the aircraft in to land in thick fog. The plane, owned by airline Utair, had touched down 400 metres from the beginning of the runway and due to damaged landing gear had then slid along the tarmac. The left wing touched the ground and the craft then broke up, officials said. Some 57 people were aboard. Original reports put the death toll at five and said 63 people were aboard. Civil defence officials later amended these figures as more information became known, news agency Itar-Tass reported. Investigators from the state general prosecutor's office said pilot error was the apparent cause of the crash. Russian state television however reported that the pilot had been forced to make an emergency landing due to failure of the landing gear to deploy. The plane had set off from the western Siberian city of Surgut and was carrying oil industry workers to Belgorod on the Ukrainian border. It had been scheduled to make a stopover in Samara. The European Commission had at the beginning of this month imposed restrictions on Utair and eight other Russian airlines due to breaches of safety regulations.
