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Tyumen emergencies agency asks local help search missing plane

Ministry says the plane may have flown beyond the limits of the Sverdlovsk region

TYUMEN, June 13 (Itar-Tass) —— The main agency of the Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations for the Tyumen region has asked local residents to give assistance in the search for a missing An-2 plane.

A report of the regional agency of the Emergencies Ministry says the plane may have flown beyond the limits of the Sverdlovsk region. Tyumen rescuers ask for help in the search for the plane from all who may have seen the flying plane from June 11 to 13, or may have other information.

Investigators work on a version that a group of passengers of the plane were drinking alcohol in the evening of June 11. Several cars that possibly belong to the plane’s passengers were left at the airfield. According to one of the versions of the police the passengers may have been a fishing party heading for an adjacent region. Calls to mobile phones of people who may be on board the plane went unanswered.

“According to unconfirmed data, the plane’s commander Khatib Kashanov of Orsk in the Orenburg region made an unsanctioned takeoff of the plane owned by the Chelyabinsk-based Avi Zov company. The plane may have some eight people on board, among them the traffic police chief of the city of Serov, a traffic police inspector, a guard of a privately-owned enterprise, a businessman, a salesman of a cell phone store and others,” Valery Gorelykh, the spokesman for the main agency of the Interior Ministry of the Russian Federation for the Sverdlovsk region, told Itar-Tass earlier.

Taking part in the search for the plane are 73 policemen and seven officers of the Emergencies Ministry. Two planes and an Mi-8 helicopter are used.

Sverdlovsk governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev on Wednesday instructed acting chairman of the regional government Vladimir Vlasov thoroughly to investigate the circumstances of the plane An-2 missing.

The governor’s information department said Kuyvashev also issued an instruction for a check of the observance of safety rules of flights from airfields for small aircraft.