41 feared dead after Russian passenger plane crash-lands in Moscow

HIGHLIGHTS

• Russian news agencies said the plane, flying from Moscow to the northern Russian city of Murmansk before turning back, had been carrying 78 passengers
• Many passengers escaped via the plane's emergency slides that inflated after the hard landing
• Russian investigators said they were looking into whether the pilots breached air safety rules

MOSCOW: Forty-one people on board a Russian 

Aeroflot

 passenger plane were killed on Sunday, including two children, after the aircraft caught fire as it made a bumpy emergency landing at a 

Moscow

 airport, Russian investigators said.

Television footage showed the Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash bouncing along the tarmac at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport before the rear part of the plane suddenly burst into flames.

Many passengers on board SU 1492 then escaped via the plane's emergency slides that inflated after the hard landing.

The plane, which had been flying from Moscow to the northern Russian city of 

Murmansk

, had been carrying 73 passengers and five crew members, 

Russia

's aviation watchdog said.

Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia's Investigative Committee, said in a statement that only 37 out of 78 people on board had survived, meaning 41 people had lost their lives.

No official cause has been given for the disaster.

The Investigative Committee said it had opened an investigation and was looking into whether the pilots had breached air safety rules.

Some passengers blamed bad weather and lightning.

"We took off and then lightning struck the plane," the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily cited one surviving passenger, Pyotr Egorov, as saying.