Russia was in mourning yesterday over its worst air disaster in two years after an Aeroflot jet crashed, killing all 88 passengers and crew.

Officials said that the tragedy near the city of Perm in the Ural mountains, 750 miles east of Moscow, was caused by an engine fault.

Alexander Bastrykin, from the Russian Prosecutor-General’s office, said: “Judging by inspections from the scene, the crash was connected to technical defects of the right engine.”

Witnesses said that the Boeing 737 was on fire shortly before it crashed on the approach to the airport.

Aeroflot said that it had leased the 15-year-old aircraft until March 2013 from Pinewatch, a Dublin-based company, in July.

The dead included seven children and 21 foreigners – nine from Azerbaijan, five from Ukraine, and one each from France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland and Turkey, with a US citizen also said to have been on board, although US Embassy officials were seeking to confirm this.

Fragments of the aircraft were scattered over more than four square kilometres (one and a half square miles), and a 100-metre (330ft) section of Trans-Siberian railway track was destroyed.

General Gennady Troshev, a former commander of Russia’s war in Chechnya, was among the victims. He once called for Chechen rebels to be hanged in public and was sacked by the then President, Vladimir Putin, in 2002 for refusing a transfer to a lesser role. The youngest victim was a nine-year-old girl, Yana Kuznetsova. President Medvedev and Mr Putin, the Prime Minister, sent messages of condolence to relatives of the dead.

The crash occurred just after 5am at the end of a flight from Moscow operated by Aeroflot Nord, a regional subsidiary of the Russian carrier. An Aeroflot statement said that Flight 821 “lost communication at the height of 1,100 metres” as it approached Perm airport and then disappeared from air traffic controllers’ radar.

Witnesses said that the plane came down over their homes before exploding near a main residential neighbourhood. One woman told Vesti-24 television: “I felt an explosion, it threw me off the bed . . . My daughter ran in from the next room crying ‘What happened? Has a war begun or what?’ ” A spokeswoman for Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said that there was no suggestion of terrorism. Both black-box flight recorders have been recovered.

Lev Koshlyakov, Aeroflot’s deputy director, said that the jet was declared to be in “proper condition” after a full technical inspection earlier this year. However, the company announced later that it was severing links with its subsidiary and would no longer allow it to use Aeroflot’s name. The airline owns a majority stake in Aeroflot Nord, but the subsidiary runs its own fleet. Valery Okulov, Aeroflot’s general director, said: “When it comes to our reputation and image, we paid too great a price.” The company promised to pay two million roubles (about £44,000) to victims’ families.

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