Russia rules out explosion on board crashed military plane

This handout video grab released by Russian Emergency Ministry on December 29, 2016, shows rescuers looking at a piece of the crashed Tu-154 military plane after lifting it during searches in the underwater area outside Sochi, in the Black Sea. (Via AFP)

Russian officials have ruled out the possibility of an explosion on board a military plane which recently crashed into the sea.

On Thursday, General Lieutenant Sergey Bainetov, the chief of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Flight Safety Service, said there was no explosion on board, but equipment was not functioning correctly when the jet plunged into the Black Sea.

A Tu-154 plane lost contact with air traffic control and crashed shortly after takeoff from Sochi airport on Sunday morning.

A total of 92 people were on board the ill-fated plane, including performers from the renowned Red Army Choir troupe and journalists. All the passengers are feared dead as no survivors have so far been found.

However, Bainetov, who heads a state committee tasked with investigating the reason behind the crash, did not rule out the possibility of a terrorist act on board the plane.

“An act of terror is not necessarily an explosion, so we are not discarding this version,” he said.

Bainetov said the air force had ground its soviet-era Tu-154 military airplane, “until the first conclusions” are made about the incident.

Meawhile, Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov said an ongoing probe had already confirmed that the plane’s equipment was malfunctioning.

“It is obvious that the equipment was functioning abnormally. Why that happened is up to experts to work out,” he told reporters.

An analysis of the second black box, which records conversations in the cockpit, suggests the pilot of the crashed plane had noticed something was wrong with equipment.

This handout video grab released by Russian Emergency Ministry on December 28, 2016, shows a diver looking at a piece of the crashed military plane carrying 92 people during searches in the underwater area outside Sochi, in the Black Sea. (Photo by AFP)

“Everything was going rather normally, but one phrase from the commander... suggests that an abnormal situation began to develop” he said.

Russian media reported, citing a dialogue in the cockpit, that the plane's flaps failed to retract on time, leading to the crash, but Bainetov refused to confirm the report.

He cautioned journalists not to jump on any theories on the crash until the investigation is over.

Until now, some 19 bodies and some 230 body parts have been found, Sokolov said.

“We established that the plane almost entirely broke apart when it hit the water surface and the sea bottom, which, of course, complicated the search," he said.

Residents in Sochi and Moscow laid flowers at makeshift memorials to remember the passengers on the plane.

The first victim of the crash was buried at a Moscow region military cemetery on Wednesday, officials said.