By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A Russian chartered airliner heading from Israel to Siberia exploded Thursday and crashed off the Black Sea coast with at least 76 people on board. U.S. officials said a missile fired during a military training exercise in Ukraine appeared to have accidentally brought down the plane.
Ukraine denied that theory. A Defense Ministry spokesman said all the missiles fired in the exercise hit their proper targets and that there was no evidence a civilian plane entered the training area.
Earlier, President Vladimir Putin said terrorism could be the cause of the crash.
A U.S. Defense Department official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a land-based surface-to-air missile had been fired from the Crimean region of Ukraine. The downing of the airliner appeared to be accidental, U.S. officials said.
Col. Vyacheslav Sedov of the Russian Defense Ministry said the ministry had heard reports about a stray missile hitting the plane but wouldn't make any immediate comment.
The explosion Thursday caused the Tupolev 154 to break into pieces and tumble to the sea 114 miles off the Russian coastal city of Adler on the Georgian border, said Vasily Yurchuk, a spokesman for the Ministry of Emergency Situations.
The plane was on its way from Tel Aviv to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, Yurchuk said. It belonged to Sibir Airlines, which is based in Novosibirsk, about 1,750 miles east of Moscow, and had been chartered, Sibir officials said.
A spokesman for the airline, Yevgeny Filenin, said that there were 64 passengers and 12 crew members aboard. All the passengers were Israelis, said Sergei Moslayov, a duty officer at the Emergency Situations Ministry.
The military exercises were conducted on Cape Onuk, in Crimea, about 160 miles from the site of the crash, on territory controlled by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Ukrainian anti-aircraft, navy, rocket forces, aviation and artillery took part as well as Russian forces including shore-based forces and a guard ship.
Part of the exercise involved firing on an unmanned aircraft.
According to military officials, the exercises included anti-aircraft S-125, S-200 and S-300 rockets, which are similar to American ``Patriot'' missiles, and R-300 tactical rockets.
But Ukrainian Defense Ministry spokesman Kostyantyn Khivrenko said all the fired missiles were accounted for and none had come near the area of the explosion.
``The direction of the firing and the distance do not correspond to the plane's explosion site either in theory or in practice,'' he said. ``All the hits by the rockets used during the exercise were recorded by corresponding devises and reached their targets.''
The air force and air traffic regulators ``did not record the presence of any civilian aircraft in the exercise area during the maneuvers,'' he said.,
Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk said in a statement that all the rockets used in the training exercise have ``self-destruction mechanisms in case they deviated from their course.''
If the missile theory were confirmed, this would not be the first time a commercial flight has been accidentally shot down. On July 3, 1988, the cruiser USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf, killing all 270 aboard.
Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia's Federal Security Service, told Putin in a televised meeting that Russian officials had first learned of the crash from Armenian officials. He said planes and ships had been sent to the area of the crash. The Black Sea is a half-mile deep at the site of the crash, authorities said.
``We must launch rescue work, gather all we can and conduct expertise. If the sea depth allows that, we must try to recover the black box,'' Putin said.
The Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman, Tatyana Andreyeva, said that one body had been recovered so far, as well as some fragments of the plane.
Garik Ovanisian, the pilot of the Armenian An-24, said his plane was at 20,790 feet above the Black Sea when the plane above his exploded.
``I saw the explosion on the plane, which was above me at an altitude of 36,300 feet,'' Ovanisian told AP. ``The plane fell into the sea, and there was another explosion in the sea. After that I saw a big white spot on the sea and I had the impression that oil was burning.''
The Armenian plane was on a regularly scheduled flight over the Black Sea from the Ukrainian Crimean city of Simferopol to the Armenian capital Yerevan.
In Romania, the Coastal Radio Service said it picked up signals for help from the Black Sea. Duty officer Traian Niculescu, stationed in the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta, told Romania's Pro-TV that he had received ``a distress call ... simply saying 'Mayday, Mayday,' without any identification.'' Then he heard conversation in Russian.
Bush administration officials quickly contacted their counterparts in Moscow in an attempt to determine whether there was a connection between the explosion and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or U.S. plans to retaliate.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the ``appropriate people'' in the Bush administration have called Russian officials to ``ascertain the facts.''
Putin, who has taken a high-profile position in the international anti-terrorist coalition that has formed following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, told a meeting of visiting European justice ministers that ``a civilian aircraft crashed today and it is possible that it is the result of a terrorist act.''
The crash was the 21st involving a Tu-154 since it entered service in the early 1970s. With some 1,000 planes built, it is the most widely used jetliner in Russia and is used in many other countries.
Vladimir Kofman, an official with the Interstate Aviation Committee, said the plane had made a stopover in Burgas, Bulgaria. However, Bulgarian officials vigorously denied that the plane had even entered Bulgaria's airspace.
After the crash, Israel suspended takeoffs of foreign flights from its main airport, Ben Gurion International near Tel Aviv.
*Associated Press Writer Susanne Schafer in Washington contributed to this story.
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