Ukraine Air Show Tragedy

Residents in this western Ukrainian city began two days of official mourning Sunday 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.

A 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 Sunday 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 for officials to identify the victims, whose bodies were being held in refrigerated trucks outside pending identification.

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," she said.

Many of the bodies were in terrible condition, complicating the identification process.

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 after his arrival in Lviv that "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 Monday 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.

Kuchma ordered Marchuk to personally lead the government commission investigating the accident.

Also, the military prosecutor's office for western Ukraine opened a criminal case into the crash and the government earmarked $1.8 million to help victims' families.

Marchuk said Sunday the two most likely reasons why the fighter plane hit the ground were air force negligence or plane failure.

He said there were other versions of events, but it was too early to come to any single conclusion.

"There are two main versions of events. The first version is negligence on the part of senior management in the air force. The second version is that the plane failed," he told a news conference in Lviv.

Without waiting for results from the inquiries, Kuchma on Saturday fired the commander of the air force as well as the top officer from the 14th Air Corps to which the jet belonged. He also said the country would consider banning air shows because of the accident.

"People should deal with their concrete military activity," Kuchma said. "No such shows should take place."

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.

Video of the crash showed the jet then sliding backward along the ground on its left wingtip and nose before it began cartwheeling and then exploded, throwing off flaming debris.

Bohdan Hupalo, 18, said he was posing for a picture when the plane came down. He dove to the ground and saw the jet race over him, missing by only a few yards.

"There weren't any survivors among those who fell down late — they were cut down like grass," he said. When Hupalo opened his eyes, he said he was surrounded by human remains.

"I will never forget this tragedy," he said from his hospital bed, where he was being treated for an injured back.

After the crash, parents frantically searched for missing children and used the public address system to call out their names. One group of children with cuts on their faces and arms sat stunned on the ground.

Severed body parts littered the tarmac at the air base. One woman was seen clutching the lifeless body of a child in front of a jet on display; another man was covered in blood while he examined the stump left of his right hand.

The two crew suffered back injuries, medical officials told Interfax news agency, but they were seen walking away from the crash scene without assistance.

More than $1.9 million will be set aside from the federal budget in an initial fund for funerals and first aid for victims, Kuchma said. About 1,500 people were watching the free air show.