Vladivostok, Russia.
The governor of Russia's oil-rich Sakhalin Island and 19 other people were killed in a helicopter crash, officials said yesterday after the wreck was found following a three-day search. The search for the Mi-8 helicopter, found on a remote hillside, was hampered by bad weather in Russia's far east. Traffic controllers lost track of the craft flying from the Kamchatka peninsula to an island in the Kuriles chain in the Pacific.
"They are all dead. There is virtually nothing left of the helicopter - it was smashed to pieces," an official at the Emergencies Ministry's far eastern branch told Reuters. He said the body of Sakhalin governor Igor Farkhutdinov and two other officials had been identified. "It is already dark out there. We have identified as many people as we could," the officer said.
Farkhutdinov was a key figure in negotiating production sharing deals with some of the world's biggest oil firms, which have pledged to invest billions of dollars in the offshore sector of Sakhalin, one of Russia's youngest oil provinces. The key deal includes a Royal Dutch/Shell-led $10-billion project to build the world's largest liquefied natural gas plant on Sakhalin and a $12-billion ExxonMobil-led project for a gas pipeline to Japan.
Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said the wreck was found by a local airlines helicopter employed in the search some 115 km south of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the city on the Kamchatka peninsula from which the doomed craft took off. Deputy Emergencies Minister Gennady Korotkin told Interfax news agency there were 20 people aboard the governor's helicopter, setting straight three days of confusion over the number which stemmed from the absence of a full boarding list.
Prosecutors have already launched an investigation into alleged irregularities concerning the flight. Korotkin said the bodies would be evacuated to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky today.
Officials have refused to speculate about the cause of the crash, saying the only thing that could so far be ruled out was collision with another aircraft. Russian media have said the craft might have hit a mountain or severe air turbulence that often develops over the area famous for its picturesque landscape of hills and volcanoes.