4 die in Moscow plane crash

Associated Press

MOSCOW

A passenger airliner careered off the runway at Russia’s third-busiest airport and partly onto a highway while landing Saturday, broke into pieces and caught fire, killing at least four people.

Officials said there were eight people aboard the Tu-204 belonging to Russian airline Red Wings that was flying back from the Czech Republic without passengers to its home at Vnukovo Airport.

Emergency officials said in a televised news conference that four people were killed and another four severely injured when the plane rolled off the runway into a snowy field and partly onto an adjacent highway, then disintegrated. No collisions with vehicles on the major, multilane highway were reported.

The plane’s cockpit area was sheared off from the fuselage and the tail section partly torn away.

The crash occurred amid snow and winds gusting up to 30 mph, but other details were not known immediately. A spokesman for Russia’s top investigative agency, Vladimir Markin, said initial indications were that pilot error was the cause.