Ukrainians mourn dead after air-show crash

Residents in this western Ukrainian city began two days of official mourning yesterday after a fighter-jet crash at an air show left at least 83 people dead and 116 others injured in one of the world's deadliest-ever air-show accidents.

An SU-27 warplane was performing risky aerobatic maneuvers at Sknyliv air base Saturday in the city of Lviv when it clipped the ground and sheared through a crowd of hundreds of spectators before exploding in a ball of fire. The two crew ejected and survived.

Yevhen Marchuk, the chief of Ukraine's Security and Defense Council who is heading the investigation, told a news conference yesterday that the death toll had risen to 83, including 19 children. He said 116 people were injured, many of them children.

"These are sad statistics," Marchuk said. He said the remains of 25 victims had been identified, but the badly mutilated condition of many other victims was making the identification process difficult. "The highest priority is to identify these people," he said.

Lviv residents have begun two days of mourning, which was announced by city governor Liubomyr Buniak. Music and entertainment programs were curtailed as residents attended church services to pray for the victims.

Hundreds of anxious relatives waited outside the Lviv morgue while officials tried to identify the victims, whose bodies were being held in refrigerated trucks outside the overcrowded morgue.

Mykhailo Kurochka, deputy head of Lviv's police service, said officials have begun to call relatives of victims to start the identification procedure. One-by-one, they will be taken to identify bodies, which will then be prepared for funerals, he said.

Svetlana Atamaniuk, whose daughter and granddaughters were killed, waited with the others for official confirmation of their deaths.

She said that she was at her home across from the airfield when she heard the plane go down. "It was ripping the air," she said.

"My only daughter, her husband and their two daughters are lying in there," she said late Saturday night, waiting outside the morgue for information. "I can't get in, I will be here until the morning."

President Leonid Kuchma, who cut short his vacation in Crimea to rush to the accident scene, on Saturday implied that a technical error could have been to blame, saying "this equipment has already functioned to its technological capacity." Much of the country's air force arsenal is left over from the Soviet era and is in poor condition.

"We don't know anything absolutely except that the pilots were the most experienced, of the highest class," Kuchma said in comments shown on state television.

Kuchma has declared today an official day of national mourning.

Ukrainian officials are very sensitive about the state of the military after last October when an errant missile fired from a Ukrainian military base shot down a Russian plane, killing all 78 people on board, most of them immigrants to Israel.

Without waiting for results from official inquiries, Kuchma on Saturday fired the commander of the air force and the top officer from the 14th Air Corps to which the jet belonged.

He also said air shows should be banned. "No such shows should take place," he said.

The SU-27 was in the sky performing low-altitude maneuvers when just before it hit the ground it went silent and banked left -- its wingtip shearing trees and touching another plane on the ground.