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Death toll rises to 41 after plane erupts into fireball at Moscow airport

Officials have confirmed 41 people on board a Russian passenger plane were killed on Sunday, after the aircraft caught fire as it made a bumpy emergency landing at a Moscow airport.

The airport said the Sukhoi Superjet operated by Russian flagship carrier Aeroflot caught fire when it made a hard emergency landing at Sheremetyevo Airport.

"There were 78 people on board, including crew members," the Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement.

"According to updated information, 37 out of them survived."

Video showed desperate passengers leaping out of the plane onto an inflatable evacuation slide and staggering across the airport’s tarmac and grass, some holding luggage.

A plane has burst into flames upon landing at an airport in Moscow. Source: AP
A plane has burst into flames upon landing at an airport in Moscow. Source: AP

Flames and smoke could be seen billowing from the rear of the plane and state TV broadcast mobile phone footage shot by another passenger in which people could be heard screaming.

The plane had been flying from Moscow to the northern Russian city of Murmansk, with the Flightradar24 tracking service showing that the plane had circled twice over Moscow before making an emergency landing after just under 30 minutes in the air.

Interfax cited a source as saying that some of the aircraft's systems had failed.

The aircraft of Aeroflot Airlines, centre, is seen after an emergency landing in Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. Source: AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko
The aircraft of Aeroflot Airlines, centre, is seen after an emergency landing in Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. Source: AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko

No official cause has been given for the incident, although some surviving passengers spoke of a lightning strike.

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

"The plane turned back and there was a hard landing. We were so scared we almost lost consciousness.

“The plane jumped down the landing strip like a grasshopper and then caught fire on the ground."

This image taken from video shows smoke from a plane on fire at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. Source: Mikhail Norenko/Twitter via AP
This image taken from video shows smoke from a plane on fire at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. Source: Mikhail Norenko/Twitter via AP

The emergency landing was so hard that debris had found its way into the engines, sparking a fire that swiftly engulfed the rear of the fuselage, the same source said.

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

The Interfax news agency cited an unnamed "informed source" as saying the evacuation of the plane had been delayed by some passengers insisting on collecting their hand luggage first.

Russian news agencies reported that the plane had been produced in 2017 and had been serviced as recently as April this year.

Russian officials are keen for Aeroflot to buy more of the Sukhoi Superjets for domestic flights to support the country's fledgling civil aircraft industry.

A Sukhoi Superjet crashed in Indonesia in 2012, killing all 45 people on board in an accident blamed on human error.

President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed their condolences and ordered investigators to establish what had happened.

More to come.

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