Tears flow at Ukraine crash site

A religious ceremony in memory of the victims was held on Monday at the airport in Lviv

LVIV, Ukraine -- Hundreds of Ukrainians have made a tearful visit to the airfield where 83 people were killed in the world's worst air show crash.

They gathered for a memorial service amid charred grass and tarmac where the Russian-made Sukhoi Su-27 clipped the ground and exploded into a fireball on Saturday.

Families from Lviv let the tears run freely as priests prayed out loud for the souls of those killed.

Journalist Elizabeth Piper told CNN that, dressed in black, relatives laid flowers and cried throughout the memorial service.

"This tragedy touched every Ukrainian, every person from Lviv. We will pray together for several minutes for the souls of those who died in the catastrophe so they rest in peace forever," a Catholic priest told the mourners.

Some, who had watched the horror unfold at the military air show, walked to the places at the Sknyliv military airfield where they had been standing on Saturday to remember the moment.

"We came here to pay our respects to all those people who lay around us. There were too many corpses around...we were just lucky to survive," Tatyana Volobuyeva, her eyes welling with tears at the memorial service, told Reuters.

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"I can't close my eyes without seeing it all again."

"We came here to show our sympathy with those who suffered," Natalya Kovalyuk, 37, told Reuters. "I just cannot make sense of how big this tragedy is, how painful it must be to lose your child.

"We could not sleep on Saturday night," sobbed the teacher who was at the air show but escaped unharmed.

Some relatives were rapidly losing hope of finding their loved ones as the Emergencies Ministry said only 72 bodies had been identified so far, including 23 children. Many people were ripped apart by metal shards flung wide across the airfield.

Flags were at half mast and black ribbons adorned buildings across Ukraine after President Leonid Kuchma declared Monday a day of national mourning.

Kuchma, seeking to apportion blame for the world's worst air show disaster, was considering whether to accept the resignation of his acting defence minister Petro Shulyak on Monday.

He has already fired or arrested several top military officials following Saturday's crash.

Ukraine's prosecutor general detained four service chiefs including the former commander of the country's airforce on Sunday, a day after he was sacked.

Officials said Volodymyr Strelnykov was detained after an investigation found that there were "serious errors in organising, preparing and conducting flights, in particular organising demonstration flights in Lviv," the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.

The head of the state commission into the accident said there were two possible reasons for the crash -- negligence among the top military ranks or plane failure.

Aviation experts said spectators at the show should not have been allowed to sit or stand in any of the plane's flight paths.

The Lviv crash was the world's worst air show disaster, eclipsing the 70 killed in 1988 when three Italian jets collided, sending one into a crowd at the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany. (More crashes)

Many of the victims were cut to pieces by burning shards of metal

Evhem Marchuk, secretary of Ukraine's defence and security council and head of the state commission into the accident, told Reuters that investigators were analysing the flight recorder retrieved from the twin-engined fighter, which fell from the sky after failing to complete a tricky aerobatics manoeuvre.

The air show had been marking the 60th anniversary of a local unit of the Ukrainian Air Force.

The Su-27 amazed audiences at its first appearances at Western air shows in the 1990s with aerobatic manoeuvres previously unknown for a twin-engined jet aircraft of its size. (More)

The reputation of Ukraine's armed forces, cash-strapped since the Soviet Union's collapse a decade ago, was blackened last October when a missile fired during a training exercise hit a Russian airliner, killing all 78 people aboard.

Just a day after the incident, a second Russian aircraft, an Ilyushin Il-86, crashed on take-off from Moscow's biggest airport, killing at least 14 people. (Full story)