A passenger jet traveling from Moscow to the Ural Mountains city of Perm crashed as it was preparing to land yesterday, killing all 88 people aboard.

A passenger jet traveling from Moscow to the Ural Mountains city of Perm crashed as it was preparing to land yesterday, killing all 88 people aboard.

The Chinese Embassy in Russia said that one Chinese citizen died in the crash. She was Fang Fang, 26, of eastern China's Zhejiang Province.

The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Irina Andrianova said there was no indication of terrorism in the crash of the Boeing 737-500, which went down just outside Perm about 3:15am.

Flight 821, operated by an Aeroflot subsidiary, carried 82 passengers and six crew, Aeroflot said.

It said among those killed were also citizens of the United States, France, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Latvia.

The plane was on its landing approach in low cloud when it crashed into an unpopulated area, just a few hundred meters from residential buildings. Aeroflot officials said the jet was circling at about 1,100 meters in "difficult weather conditions" when it lost contact with ground control.

Alexander Bastrykin, from the Russian Prosecutor-General's office investigating the crash, said it was caused by the right engine failing.

Investigators have found the plane's black-box flight recorders and are working to analyze them.

A section of rail track was destroyed in the crash, which scattered clothing, life preservers and parts of engines for several hundred meters.

Part of the Trans-Siberian railway was shut down as a result of the rail damage, said Alexander Burataeva, a spokesman for the national railroad company.

"I felt an explosion it threw me off the bed," a woman in Perm, who was not identified, told Vesti-24 TV.

She said her daughter was weeping as she believed a war had begun.

"My neighbors told me it was burning in the air and looked like a comet," the woman said. "It hit the ground opposite the next house."

Pavel Shevchenko, a 36-year-old Perm resident who lives just 300 meters from the crash site, said he was awoken by an explosion and ran outside. He said debris was scattered around the area but the flames kept him from getting closer.

"It's awful. There's just no words to describe it. Perm is a small town, everybody knows everybody else here," Shevchenko told The Associated Press.

Perm is about 1,200 kilometers east of Moscow.

Russia and the other former Soviet Union republics have some of the world's worst air traffic safety records, according to the International Air Transport Association.

A passenger jet traveling from Moscow to the Ural Mountains city of Perm crashed, killing all 88 people aboard.

(Shanghai Daily September 15, 2008)