Swiss citizen confirmed as victim of Moscow plane crash
A Swiss man is among the 71 people who died in a Moscow plane crash on Sunday, the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) confirmed on Monday in Bern.
“The FDFA has been in touch with the relatives of the victim. The foreign affairs minister, Ignazio Cassis, sends his condolences to all families which have been affected by the tragedy, including the Swiss victim’s relatives, and wishes them strength at this difficult time,” the FDFA confirmed to the Swiss news agency SDA.
The Swiss victim was an engineer and had travelled to Russia for a business trip.
The aircraft crashed on Sunday, just a few minutes after take-off from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, killing all 71 people on board. The plane was carrying six crew members and 65 passengers, Russian state news agency RIA reported. The plane was headed to the city of Orsk, near the Kazakh border.
The reasons behind the crash remain unclear. The Saratov Airlines crew didn’t report any problems before the plane crashed into snowy terrain, reported Russian state-run media.
Russian authorities said that they will look into all possible hypotheses which could have led to the crash, including weather conditions, human error, or a technical problem. Emergency services have recovered the plane’s black box, transport minister, Maxime Sokolov, said on Monday.
They already established, however, that the crash is unrelated to terrorist activity. “It has been shown that the aircraft was whole at the time of the crash, any fire and explosions only occurred only after the crash,” said the investigation committee in a statement.
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