MOSCOW, December 26. /TASS/. A republican hospital for children in Chechnya’s capital of Grozny has been named after late Elizaveta Glinka, known as Dr. Liza, who died in a plane crash near Russia’s Sochi on Sunday, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said.
"I have decided to name the republican children’s hospital in the city of Grozny after Elizaveta [Glinka]," Kadyrov wrote on his Instagram.
According to the Chechen leader, Dr. Liza dedicated her life to the most noble duty ever, which was saving children from conflict zones.
"Having an exemplary doctor’s education, she could have simply worked at a regular hospital, but she chose a complicated path of helping those, who had no hope for help at all," Kadyrov said. "She will always be remembered by people."
Dr. Liza, who is Executive Director of the Fair Aid charity fund, was on the list of passengers of the Tu-154 that crashed in the Black Sea near Sochi on Sunday morning. The charity fund later confirmed that Glinka flew to Syria onboard the Defense Ministry’s plane.
The Russian Defense Ministry’s Tu-154 plane disappeared from radar screens at 05.40 a.m. Moscow time (02.40 a.m. GMT) shortly after taking off from the Black Sea resort of Sochi on early Sunday.
There were 92 people on board the aircraft in total, including eight crew members and 84 passengers. Among the passengers were Elizaveta Glinka as well as military servicemen and nine reporters, from Russian television channels Channel One, Zvezda and NTV.
The plane was also carrying 68 members of the famous Alexandrov Ensemble, an official army choir of the Russian Armed Forces. The ensemble was on its way to celebrate the New Year with the group of Russia’s Aerospace Forces at the Hmeymim air base in Syria. The choir’s conductor Valery Khalilov was also among the passengers.
The Defense Ministry said that fragments of the crashed Tu-154 had been discovered some 1.5 kilometers off the coast of Sochi at the depth of 50-70 meters. Eleven bodies of the crash victims have been found. No one has survived. A large-scale search and rescue operation is underway.