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10 months ago
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THE entire air ambulance crew involved in a deadly plane crash that saw two passengers die have miraculously survived.
Russian millionaire Anatoly Evsyukov and his wife Anna both died in the tragic crash in Afghanistan but the other four people on board somehow escaped the treacherous conditions alive.
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Co pilot Arkady Grachev also survived and helped to land the planeEast2West
Smoke can be seen billowing in the air at the suspected site of the crashEast2West
The youngest survivor was paramedic Igor Syvorotkin, 26, who walked to the nearest Afghan village of Pedu to find help and told his mother he was okayEast2West
Paramedic Pavel Popov survived the crashEast2WestPictures of three of the four shell shocked survivors have been released and shows two of the men with bad facial injuries and looking visibly shaken up.
The Russian Falcon 10 air ambulance had six people on board when it vanished from the radar screens in a mountainous area in Afghanistan on Saturday.
It’s understood the pilots reported problems with the engines and fuel levels while flying before vanishing from radar screens at 7.30pm local time in the Badakhshan province.
Footage appeared to show smoke rising from the site at least 12 hours after the crash, which would have been plunged into darkness.
The Taliban‘s Transportation and Civil Aviation Ministry said the plane was found in the province’s Kuf Ab district, near the Aruz Koh mountain, on Sunday.
“The pilot was found by the search team of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” the statement said.
A Russian couple both tragically died in the crash in the mountainous Badakhshan province but the two pilots and two medics on board miraculously survived.
Many people feared all those inside the plane were dead after seeing the plane in near free fall.
The surviving four people had to battle through the harsh snowy mountains to find safety after facing what many would consider almost certain death.
Despite the mangled remains of the air ambulance on the ground the four survivors only suffered minor injuries.
The youngest of these was 26-year-old paramedic Igor Syvorotkin who battled through the rough conditions and walked to the nearest Afghan village of Pedu to find help.
After fighting through the vicious cold weather and lack of suitable clothes and equipment for the mountainous trek, Igor was then forced to scramble to use sign language to speak to the Afghan locals.
Igor’s mother told local media: “We know he is alive, he called us.”
The other paramedic was named as Pavel Popov.
However it is Dmitry Belyakov and Arkady Grachev who played the most pivotal role in the great escape as they heroically piloted the plane down to the ground as safely as they could.
They brought the plane down and into the snow-covered mountains in an impressive manner to keep themselves and the two paramedics alive.
The service in charge of the evacuation flight was ATLETIK-GRUPP LLC.
They are headed up by Arkady’s ex-wife Ekaterina Agapova.
After the crash Ekaterina said: “Nothing is known yet, now I’m trying to understand the situation and understand what happened. There is no confirmed data yet.”
According to Argumenty i Fakty – a Russian news outlet – Ekaterina and Arkady kept the Falcon 10 air ambulance after their divorce and continued to use it, even though it was reportedly in a worsening condition.
Izvestia newspaper reported after the tragic crash that the plane was supposed to be empty and that no passengers or cargo were scheduled to be on board.
Izvestia went on to report: “Pilots Dmitry Belyakov and Arkady Grachev of the Falcon 10 aircraft had minimal experience in flying this aircraft. They completed training only in 2023.
“The pilots had private pilot certificates, but with such a certificate they could not fly an aircraft operating a commercial flight.”
On the return, it flew from U-Tapao, near Pattaya in Thailand, where the woman had been hospitalised for several weeks after becoming sick with a mystery sickness.
Evsyukov’s wife Anna had become seriously ill on a luxury holiday in Thailand and was being flown back to Russia for treatment on the doomed aircraft.
It stopped to refuel in Gaya, India and was set to make a second trip down to Tashkent, Uzbekistan before finally landing in Zhukovsky airport in Moscow.
However, reports say after issues in the air the pilot duo decided to make an unscheduled stop in Tajikistan.
Moments after this decision it’s believed that an engine failed before the second also stopped working just ten minutes later.
The plane then disappeared from any flight radars still 35miles from the nearest airport in Tajikistan.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed the downed Russian plane was found in the Kuf Ab district of Badakhshan with two people dead.
The son of the millionaire Russian couple Vitali Evsyukov, 41, was on a separate flight towards Moscow at the time of the crash.
He only found out when he was back on the ground that his parents had died.
Vitali was told he couldn’t board the same plane as his parents because only one accompanying passenger is allowed on small executive air ambulances.
The chilling crash is the first since Russian planes were subject to strict sanctions because of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Multiple emergency landings and air incidents have been recorded since due to a lack of spare parts and essential maintenance involving Western suppliers.
This is the ninth incident on record involving a Russian plane since the beginning of 2024 and the eighth to have happened during the flight in the last nine days.
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Anna Evsyukova, 59, was seriously ill and had an air ambulance fly to pick her up from Thailand before she died in the tragic crashEast2West
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