A helicopter with nine people on board crashed in southern Russia on Thursday, and there was little hope that anyone survived, officials said.

A Ka-32 helicopter, the same model as the one that went missing Thursday near the Black Sea resort of Sochi, sits at an airfield at an undisclosed location in Russia in this June 2001 photo. The Ka-32 helicopter with nine people on board was flying on a mission in southern Russia and went missing in the mountains in deep fog, said Alexander Lemeshev, a spokesman for the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry's branch in southern Russia.   [AP]

The Ka-32 helicopter — which its owners said was delivering supplies to a construction site in the mountains — was flying near the Black Sea resort city of Sochi when it went missing in heavy fog, said Alexander Lemeshev, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry's branch in southern Russia.

Nikolai Shustov, the chief of the ministry's office in Sochi, said the helicopter had nine people on board, including five passengers.

Construction workers found the burned-out helicopter near a mountain about 35 miles north of Sochi, said Rudolf Teimurazov, deputy head of the Interstate Aviation Committee in Moscow.

Preliminary reports from rescuers who reached the site indicated there were no survivors, Teimurazov said.

However, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov, in Moscow, later said that rescue workers sent to the rugged area had not yet reached the crash site.

Ground controllers lost communication with the crew after hearing a bang. Mountaineers in the area told emergency officials in Sochi that they had seen a helicopter flying low over the mountains and then heard an explosion and saw smoke.

The crash, which came just as Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Sochi, follows two recent helicopter crashes that killed 26 people last month in Russia's Far East.

The Aug. 20 crash of an Mi-8 helicopter in the Kamchatka Peninsula killed all 20 people on board, including a regional governor.

On Aug. 26, two military Mi-24 helicopter gunships collided while landing following military exercises in the Russian Far East, killing six crew.

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