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Missing An-2 might have crashed while landing

The police, officers from the investigations committee and rescuers are still working at the site

YEKATERINBURG, May 5 (Itar-Tass) - The An-2 airplane that has been missing in the Urals since June 2012 might have crashed while landing, a spokesman for the Sverdlovsk region police department told Itar-Tass on Sunday.

Fragments of an An-2 plane were found in the in the Katasminskoye bog, some eight kilometres from the town of Serov, where the ill-fortune An-2 took off from on June 11, 2012.

“Presumably, the plane crashed while landing. Its wing hit trees’ tops and crashed. While falling down, the plane broke two trees, others soon resumed their position, that is why it was next to impossible to spot the fragments from the air,” the spokesman said.

According to the spokesman, the crash might have been followed by fire. The bodies are burnt all over. “Policemen searching the area found human remains (of more than 11 people) and personal belongings of the passengers,” he said.

The police, officers from the investigations committee and rescuers are still working at the site.

Earlier, the spokesman officially confirmed that the fragments found in the forest near Serov belonged to the An-2 airplane that got missing in the area last June. On June 11, 2012, An-2 pilot Khatip Kashapov took off without permission from the airfield in the town of Serov. The plane belonged to the Avia Zov Company. There were 12 passengers on board. Aircraft and search parties inspected more than one million square kilometres of terrain in the Perm Territory, the Chelyabinsk, Tyumen, Kurgan and Svedlovsk regions and the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area. The search operation was officially halted on November 13, 2012.

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