Parts of crashed Russian plane found

Moscow: Russian divers yesterday found parts of the military plane that crashed in the Black Sea with 92 people onboard, a local official said.
"The (plane) debris are at the depth of 27 metres one mile from the shore," (89 feet) said Rimma Chernova, a spokeswoman for the Sochi-based search and rescue operations run by the Russian emergency ministry.
Russian news agencies had earlier quoted an unnamed official as saying that the fuselage of the plane had been found, a statement local authorities did not confirm when contacted.
Chernova added that divers were planning to use a remotely-operated diving machine to determine the precise coordinates and size of the plane parts in order to understand what to do next.
Officials said earlier that the flight recorders that could contain information about the Tu-154 plane's last moments before the crash were located in its tail.
The plane carrying 92 people, including over 60 members of the Red Army Choir, went down on Sunday minutes after taking off from the airport of southern resort city Sochi, where it was refuelling on its way to Syria. Thousands of people and dozens of ships, helicopters and drones, including deep-water diving machines, are taking part in the search operation.
Thousands of rescuers were searching for bodies in the Black Sea as Russia marked a day of mourning yesterday following the crash of a Syria-bound military plane carrying 92 people.
The Tu-154 jet, whose passengers included more than 60 members of the internationally-renowned Red Army Choir who were heading to entertain Russian troops in Syria for the New Year, went down off the resort city of Sochi shortly after take-off Sunday. The first 10 bodies have been flown in to the capital Moscow amid a national outpouring of grief.  Investigators have yet to confirm the cause of the crash, but Transport Minister Maksim Sokolov told a televised briefing Monday that authorities do not believe the plane was taken out by a terrorist attack.
"There could be various causes -- they are being analysed by specialists, experts, the Investigative Committee," he said, adding that active theories ranged from human error to a problem with the fuel.
"Currently the main versions do not include an act of terror," he added.
More than three thousand workers laboured through the night, racing to find the remaining bodies and debris -- including the black boxes crucial to tracking the plane's final moments -- before the currents carry them further away from shore.  The search operation included 39 vessels covering over 100 square kilometres (38 square miles), with planes, helicopters and drones searching from above and deep-water equipment and divers hunting below the surface.
"I think we will be able to find the location of the plane on the bottom of the Black Sea today," Viktor Bondarev, the commander of the Russian air force, told Russian agencies.
"When we find the plane, we will raise the flight recorders to the surface. We know they are located in the tail and I am sure that the tail was damaged the least," he said.
Sokolov said some of the bodies could have already been carried off by the current to Abkhazia, the separatist region of Georgia. "Eleven bodies and 154 (body) fragments were found over the first day," defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a briefing.
"The search is complicated by the large depth range and the sea bottom relief characteristics in the presumed crash area," he said. Along with the first ten bodies, 86 body parts were flown to the capital for DNA analysis, he added. The passenger jet went down minutes after taking off at 5:25 am (0225 GMT) on Sunday morning from Sochi's airport, where it had stopped to refuel after flying out from the Chkalovsky military aerodrome in the Moscow region.
Onboard were 64 members of the Alexandrov Ensemble -- the army's official musical group, also known as Red Army Choir -- and their conductor Valery Khalilov.