by Karim Talbi
BUCHALKI, Russia, Aug 25 (AFP) - It sounded like a thunderclap on a summer night.
It was followed at daybreak with the clatter of helicopters, scores of search and rescue personnel and the realization that the sound was a passenger jet with 43 people on board crashing into rolling pastures near this bucolic hamlet.
"First there was a sound like thunder in the sky, not really loud but you could definitely hear it," recounted Maxim, a 20-year-old local resident who was still awake late Tuesday when the plane went down nearby.
"We heard it clearly at around 11 o'clock. Around 2 o'clock we tried to go see what had happened but the police were already there and prevented us from getting close."
As the hundred or so residents of Buchalki watched, scores of emergency workers and investigators from several Russian government agencies, coming and going by helicopter and car, combed over the field a kilometer (half a mile) down the road.
Along a curve in the road between two pastures lay a six-meter (20-foot) portion of the rear section of the aircraft as well as several passenger seats upholstered in blue cloth. A clutch of officials milled around the wreckage, conversing quietly.
A few hundred meters further, on a slope in another field, rested the main portion of the fuselage, already partially dismantled, with pieces being airlifted out of the site by helicopters from the ministry for emergency situations.
Around 40 investigators worked at various spots around the crash site.
Katya, a 13-year-old Buchalki resident, gave a similar account of what had happened during the night.
"We were sitting down at home and we heard a thunderclap," she said.
"We went out into the street and friends told us it was a plane. Our parents were asleep and didn't hear anything."
The plane that went down outside Buchalki was carrying 43 people and had been scheduled to fly from Moscow to the southern city of Volgograd.
Another plane carrying 46 passengers and crew crashed at almost precisely the same moment hundreds of kilometers further south after taking off earlier from the same Moscow airport.
Authorities have said they are investigating several possible explanations for the crashes, including terrorism, and the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin had broken off a holiday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi and returned to Moscow.