MOSCOW, Aug 25 (AFP) - A Russian airliner crashed in central Russia and another went missing almost simultaneously in the country`s south, Russia`s emergency ministry said early Wednesday.
There was no word of any survivors among the 80-plus passengers and crews of the two planes and an air traffic control source said the possibility of a terrorist attack could not be ruled out amid reports of an explosion aboard one of the planes.
A Tupelov Tu-134 aircraft with 34 passengers and eight crew on board was en route from Moscow to Russia`s southern city of Volgograd when it disappeared off radar screens at 2300 (1900 GMT) Tuesday, the ministry`s spokeswoman Marina Ryklina said.
Its tail was later found near the village of Buchalki in the Tula region some 180 kilometers (110 miles) south of Moscow, Ryklina said. The fate of the passengers and crew was unclear.
Investigators would wait until dawn to examine the debris and search for the plane`s black box flight data recorders, the emergency ministry said.
Local emergency ministry officials cited witness reports of an explosion aboard before the airplane went down, the Interfax news agency reported.
A minute before that crash a Tu-154 airplane with 46 people on board went missing near the southern city of Rostov-on-Don during a flight from Moscow to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, officials said.
According to the plane`s owner, Siberian Airlines, 38 passengers and eight crew were aboard the Tu-154, which had been flying since 1982.
Both planes left from Moscow`s Domodedovo airport and dropped off radar screens within a minute of each other, a source in Moscow`s air controller center told the ITAR-TASS news agency, adding that he could not exclude the possibility of a terrorist act.
President Vladimir Putin ordered the FSB security service to investigate both incidents "without delay," the Kremlin press service said.
The Interstate Aviation Committee, formed by 12 former Soviet republics, would also investigate the incident, officials quoted by ITAR-TASS said.
Unnamed sources told Interfax that security was boosted at all of Russia`s airports.
Over the past five years, a total of 764 people have died in 226 airplane crashes in Russia, according to a report published in April by the parliamentary transport committee.
The worst post-Soviet airplane disaster also involved a Tu-154 airliner, which crashed near the Siberian city of Irkutsk while coming in to land, killing 145 people in what was described as an accident caused by pilot error.