Eight foreigners die in Azeri plane crash

A technical problem caused a crash of a plane in Azerbaijan, which killed 23 people including eight foreigners, officials said yesterday.

The Antonov An-140 aircraft, bound for the Kazakh city of Aktau, disappeared from radar screens soon after take-off from the Azeri capital Baku on Friday night.

Ilham Amirov, a representative of the flight safety department for national flagship carrier AZAL, said the plane crashed because of a technical problem.

"The initial analysis says the plane had problems with the controlling systems," he told reporters.

The wreckage of the plane, which carried 18 passengers and five crew, was found on the sea shore near Nardaran on the outskirts of Baku.

Amirov said the airline would have more precise information once it had found the black box, located in the tail end of the plane. The tail end is in the sea and AZAL would start looking for it today.

The An-140 is a relatively new short-range passenger plane designed in the 1990s. The aircraft, which has two propeller engines and can carry up to 52 passengers, is produced jointly by Ukraine and Russia.

Witnesses said that before crashing, the plane made slow circles as if the crew were trying to direct it away from residential areas.

A Baku airport official said the dead foreigners were an Australian, a Turk, a Georgian, four Kazakhs and a British citizen.

Azerbaijan, situated on the Caspian Sea, is a former Soviet republic with a thriving oil and gas industry.