Russian military plane, carrying 91, headed for Syria ‘disappears from radar’!

• The plane was on its way to Syria.

AFP/IANS

A Russian Defence Ministry TU-154 plane that had disappeared from radar over the Black Sea with 91 people on board has crashed, the Interfax news agency reported on Sunday, citing an unidentified source.

A rescue team had found the crash site in the Black Sea near the coast of the Sochi, Interfax said.

Other Russian news agencies reported earlier that the Russian aircraft had disappeared from radar soon after taking off from Sochi, a Black Sea resort town.

The aircraft is not a civilian one and was en route to the Syrian port city of Latakia, an Emergency Ministry source told Sputnik News Agency. It lost contact with land over the Black Sea.

"The jet disappeared from radars about 20 minutes after takeoff, it departed (from Sochi) at 5.20 a.m., and the contact was lost at about 5.40 a.m.," he said.Popular flight tracking profile on Twitter, flightradar24 tweeted this alert:

We are aware of reports of a missing Russian Tu-154 that departed Sochi. We are checking now if we received data from the aircraft.- Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) December 25, 2016

The people onboard included journalists, military personnel, musicians, the source said.

The ministry said the plane was carrying the famous Alexandrov military band for a concert at the Russian air base in Syria.

Initially it was reported that the plane was carrying some 70 people.

The Tu-154 is a three-engine medium-range airliner produced by Russian aerospace and defence company Tupolev. It is one of the fastest civilian aircraft in use and widely used in extreme Arctic conditions.

This is a developing story and will be updated as more details come in.