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Americans lay flowers expressing condolences over Tu-154 crash

WASHINGTON, December 26. /TASS/. Citizens of the United States bring flowers to the Russian Embassy in Washington expressing their condolences for victims of Tu-154 passenger aircraft crash near the resort city of Sochi on early Sunday.

"We express our deepest condolences in regard with this tragedy," one of the visitors at the Russian Embassy in Washington told TASS. "This tragedy took away lives of people. Our condolences come from the bottom of our hearts."

Besides flowers, people are also lighting candles at the Russian Embassy’s building as well as leaving their personal notes and letters expressing condolences both in English and Russian languages.

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 was the Executive Director of the Spravedlivaya Pomoshch (Fair Aid) charity fund, Elizaveta Glinka, better known to the Russian public as Dr. Liza, 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.