IRKUTSK, Russia - At least 137 people died when a Russian Airbus plane veered off a runway, slammed into a concrete wall and burst into flames while landing in the Siberian city of Irkutsk.

"Sixty-three people survived the crash... There were 200 people on board," a spokesman for the Irkutsk section of the emergency situations ministry told AFP.

Eleven people walked away from the crash site Sunday and 52 others were hospitalised, he said, adding that 120 bodies have been recovered from the fuselage so far.

The incident occurred when the Airbus A310 careered off the tarmac in slippery conditions, hit the concrete wall and ploughed into a complex of garages used by local residents, officials said.

"I lost consciousness. Then I ran to find the emergency exit and jumped out," said Margarita Svetlova, a young survivor interviewed on the Rossiya television channel.

Fourteen children, including a group on their way to a holiday in the scenic Lake Baikal region, and 11 foreign nationals were on board the Sibir airline plane, Interfax quoted the company as saying.

The foreigners were three Chinese, two Germans, two Moldovans, two Poles and two South Koreans.

It was the second recent crash of an Airbus plane in Russia, after an Armenian Airbus A320 crashed into the Black Sea near Sochi in May killing all 113 on board.

Sunday's incident occurred at 8:00 am (2300 GMT Saturday) as the flight from Moscow's Domodedovo airport was landing in the city in central Siberia, five time zones east of Moscow.

Russia's Vesti 24-hour news channel broadcast images recorded on a mobile phone that showed flames and thick black smoke billowing from the fuselage of the plane.

In the images, rescuers cut away pieces of the fuselage and the report said survivors were evacuated from the rear of the plane, while the fire raged for three hours before it was extinguished.

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed "his deep condolences to relatives and friends of those who died in the plane crash in Irkutsk," the Kremlin press service said.

Putin has declared Monday a national day of mourning and called for cultural institutions and television stations to cancel entertainment programmes, the Kremlin said in a written statement.

The Russian president ordered a government enquiry to be set up, Transport Minister Igor Levitin was quoted by Interfax as saying as he left Moscow to join the investigation.

No definite reason for the crash has yet been put forward, but officials said that the black box flight recorders have been found and sent to Moscow for examination.

Airbus said a team of specialists had been dispatched to Russia and the company said in a written statement it would provide "full technical assistance to the authorities."

The spokesman for the emergency situations ministry said investigators were looking into "many" possible versions for the crash.

"The landing gear may have caught fire while landing, igniting the rest of the plane. Or there was a short circuit while the plane was still in the air, which disabled the brakes," the spokesman told AFP.

Prosecutors announced they had opened a criminal enquiry into the crash.

Among those on board the plane was the head of the FSB security service for the Irkutsk region, General Sergei Koryakov, officials said.

The landing at Irkutsk airport is believed to be one of the most difficult in Russia because the runway is unusually short due to surrounding mountains.

In a previous major accident at Irkutsk airport in 2001, all 145 people aboard a Tu-154 jet were killed as the plane was coming in for landing.

Putin, whose already huge popularity will be boosted by the news just as he prepares to mark a high point of his six years in power by hosting the G8 summit, said Basayev's death was "deserved retribution" for his campaign of killing.

More than 331 people, half of them children, were killed in Beslan in September 2004 after Russian forces tried to end a siege of the school which had been seized by Islamist militants linked to Chechnya's fight for independence.

"This is deserved retribution against the bandits for our children in Beslan, in Budennovsk, for all these acts of terror they committed in Moscow and other Russian regions, including Ingushetia and Chechnya," the Kremlin leader said in televised comments.

Budennovsk was a reference to an attack on a hospital in June 1995 -- long before Putin came to power. Rebels seized hundreds of hostages in the southern town and more than 100 people died during the rebel assault and a botched Russian commando raid.

FSB chief Patrushev said Basayev, together with other Chechen fighters, was killed in Ingushetia, a region neighboring Chechnya.

Patrushev said it was in Ingushetia that Basayev and his men had been planning to carry out a terrorist act to coincide with the G8 summit.

"They intended to use this terrorist act to put pressure on Russia's leadership at a time when the G8 summit was being held," Patrushev said.

Pictures on state television showed the wreckage of a truck that had been packed with explosive and apparently blew up, killing Basayev and several other rebels.

There was no information that the truck had been under fire from security forces when the blast happened.

A statement on website www.kavkazcenter.com said the Chechen rebel leadership was not making any comment for the time being.

The heavily-bearded Basayev, who was born in 1965, professed to be a devout Muslim. His left foot was blown off by a mine in 2000 and he wears a prosthesis.

Basayev, in a television interview aired last year, justified the attack on Beslan by saying Russian civilians -- including children -- were legitimate targets in his homeland's bloody fight for independence from Moscow.

"We are at war. Russians ... pay their taxes for this war, send their soldiers to this war, their priests sprinkle holy water on the soldiers," Basayev said in his soft lilt.

"How can they be innocent? Russians are accomplices in this war. It is just they don't all have weapons in their hands," he said in the interview with Britain's Channel 4.

"All 41 passengers and four crew members on board the plane have died," said Iftikhar Babar, the district coordination officer for Multan, which lies about 400 miles southwest of the capital, Islamabad.

Malik Bashir, Pakistan International Airlines' station manager at Multan airport, said the cause of the crash was not yet known, but ruled out the possibility of a terrorist attack on the state carrier's plane.

A PIA emergency department official who identified himself by a single name, Bashir, said the dead passengers were all Pakistani. They included two army brigadiers, two judges of the High Court in Lahore and the head of a state-run university in Multan.

A female flight attendant who was pulled alive from the plane's wreckage died later at a hospital, airline security official Mohammed Iqbal said.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf expressed grief over the crash and ordered an investigation to determine the cause, state-run Pakistan Television reported.

Grieving relatives waiting at the hospital wept in anguish and beat their chests.

Bashir said the flight took off normally for the flight to Lahore, the capital of eastern Punjab province. "Whatever happened to it was after takeoff," he said.

Mohammed Nadeem, who lives near the crash site, said the plane was rotating sideways in the air before it hit the ground and went up in flames.

Another witness said the plane hit the ground with a huge thud and its wreckage caught fire.

"The plane begin to come down abruptly. Then it hit the ground. Then there were flames and dust," Arshad Gujjar said.

In August 1989, another PIA Fokker, with 54 people onboard, went down in northern Pakistan on a domestic flight. The plane's wreckage was never found.

In September 1992, a PIA Airbus A300 crashed into a mountain in Nepal, killing all 167 people on board. Investigators found the plane was flying 1,500 feet lower than it reported as it approached the Katmandu airport.

The aircraft was coming from Hilton Head Island, S.C., and overshot the runway while trying to land at High Valley Airport in Suches, said Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the
Federal Aviation Administration.

No one was in the house at the time of the crash, Hromalik said.

Hromalik said he believed three were killed. Two others were in critical condition. One passenger was airlifted to Erlanger Medical Center in Chattanooga, Tenn., while the other was sent to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.

The identities and ages of the victims were not immediately available.

The plane was registered to MASI LLC, a company in Hilton Head, according to the FAA Web site. Phone calls to the company went unanswered.

A National Transportation Safety Board spokesman said the agency will investigate.

"I think it could have been somebody shooting at the plane, or it could have been a terrorist attack," said Mona Morfis of Long Island, on a recent visit with her grandchildren to the seaside memorial garden that pays tribute to the victims and their rescuers.

The man who spent years leading the federal investigation into the crash has no such doubts.

Robert Francis, the former vice chairman of the
National Transportation Safety Board, still gets missives urging him to come clean about terrorism theories or witness accounts of a streak of light heading toward the plane.

Now retired and living in McLean, Va., Francis said he never responds to "very insulting e-mails, asking me when am I going to tell the truth and asking why am I lying."

Because Flight 800 disintegrated over the ocean, Francis said, there was ample time for conspiracy theories to flourish.

"There was no ability to make a determination quickly," he said. "We were picking up the wreckage in 130 feet of water."

Investigators eventually recovered 98 percent of the wreckage from the ocean floor and painstakingly rebuilt a large part of the airliner.

"We studied if it had been a missile, what would it have done to the fuselage? We had scientists in the desert shooting rockets into old fuselages," he said in a recent telephone interview. "We didn't find a single piece of wreckage that would have pointed to that kind of explosion. So I say to the missile theorists: 'Show me something.' "

Another theory was that a missile from a Navy ship 200 miles away took down the plane, but Francis questioned why no one on the cruiser ever came forward. "You mean to tell me everybody kept their mouths shut?"



He said investigators also searched for evidence that a terrorist had launched a shoulder-fired missile from the nearby shore. "We never found any of that," he said. "They searched every marina, every wharf."

But why did so many people have doubts?

"It's more acceptable to the public if somebody did this, rather than blame it on maintenance or design," said Pete Field, a retired Marine Corps pilot who now works as an aviation crash consultant.

He said witnesses who claimed to have seen streaks of light heading toward the plane actually saw pieces of flaming wreckage falling, the official theory offered by the NTSB.

"You see trails (of light) and it's easy to get your mind confused," he said. "I do accident investigations all the time and I find that the mind traps an image, even if it's not there. Even some aviation experts will tell you they saw something that just could not have happened."

Eileen Best, who tends the garden at the TWA 800 Memorial at Smith Point County Park, said many visitors have shared their misgivings about the official conclusion.

"Many people on Long Island still have doubts," she said as she prepared the garden for a 10-year commemoration on July 17.

In addition to the 230 people from 14 countries who perished, the memorial honors the hundreds of police officers, firefighters, rescue workers and boaters who raced to the scene.

A bench at the memorial is dedicated to the Rev. Mychal Judge, the New York Fire Department chaplain who was on duty on July 17, 1996, and acted as a counselor to the mourners for years afterward. Six weeks before he became the first official victim of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, Judge joined relatives at a ceremony for the fifth anniversary of the TWA 800 crash.

"Every year that you come here, you make this spot more blessed and more sacred, if that's possible," Judge said.

"They think it was the gas line," Snow said. Power company Con Edison confirmed its crews had been responding to complaints from a gas customer at an adjacent building when the blast occurred.

Heavy black smoke rose high above the building, wedged between taller structures on 62nd Street between Park and Madison Avenues just a few blocks from Central Park. Damage, including shattered windows, could be seen at one of the adjoining buildings.

Yaakov Kermaier, 36, a resident in a building next door, said he was outside when he heard "a deafening boom. I saw the whole building explode in front of me."

"Everybody started running, nobody knew what was coming next," he said. His nanny and newborn escaped from their next-door apartment unharmed.

Thad Milonas, 57, was operating a coffee cart across from the building when he said the ground shook and the building came down, said he helped two bleeding women from the scene.

TV host Larry King, who had been in a hotel room nearby, described the explosion to CNN as sounding like a bomb and feeling like an earthquake.

"I've never heard a sound like that," King said.

Streets around the area were closed off to traffic as ambulances and rescue units responded just before 9 a.m. Dozens of onlookers stood behind police tape watching the smoke as it engulfed the Manhattan sky.

Lt. Eugene Whyte said the building included two doctors' offices. One of the doctors has been accounted for, he said.