Ukrainians hunt for loved ones after air show crash

Relatives crowded hospital corridors yesterday seeking news of loved ones injured or missing when a jet crashed into spectators in western Ukraine, killing 83 in the world's worst air show disaster.

Some searched for relatives to no avail as officials struggled to identify those killed when the Russian-made Sukhoi Su-27 fighter plane clipped the ground and cartwheeled into a crowd on Saturday, exploding into a fireball.

More than 100 people, including children, were injured. A second Russian aircraft, an Ilyushin Il-86, crashed on take-off from Moscow's biggest airport yesterday, killing at least 14 people.

Keeping his vow to punish those responsible for the air show crash, President Leonid Kuchma sacked the acting defence minister and the prosecutor general detained the country's ex-air force commander and three other top military officials.

The prosecutor general's office said "serious errors" in preparing for an air show had contributed to the deaths.

Evhem Marchuk, secretary of Ukraine's defence and security council and head of the state commission into the accident, said investigators were analysing the flight recorder retrieved from the twin-engined fighter, which fell from the sky on Saturday after failing to complete a tricky aerobatics manoeuvre.

He said it was getting increasingly hard to identify the bodies, many ripped apart by metal shards from the plane which were flung across the Sknyliv military air field, on the outskirts of this picturesque city.

"Some of the bodies are so damaged that the final death toll could change by one body either way, but no more than that," Marchuk said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Pope sent their condolences to the victims' families in Lviv, considered by most of Ukraine's six million Catholics to be a symbol of their church's survival during the persecution under communism.

"These days have been the most terrible days of my life," said Lyudmila, 65, declining to give her surname.

"Yesterday my daughter and son-in-law went to the air show and since then I haven't heard anything about or from them," she sobbed, wrapping her arms around her black-clad figure as she said she had already visited three hospitals and found nothing.

Late on Saturday, Kuchma vowed to punish those responsible for the crash. He sacked Ukraine's air force chief and launched an investigation to be led by top officials.

Yesterday he fired the head of armed forces' general staff, Petro Shulyak, because he was standing in for the defence minister at the time of the crash, local television reported.

Defence Minister Volodymyr Shkidchenko was reported by UNIAN news agency as offering his resignation to Kuchma. Kuchma's press spokeswoman and a Defence Ministry official said they could not confirm either reports.

The prosecutor general's office said Ukraine's former air force commander, Volodymyr Strelnykov, had been detained along with three other senior officials because there had been "serious errors" in preparing for display flights in Lviv.

Strelnykov was sacked as air force commander on Saturday.