Foreign experts who arrived in Perm on Tuesday morning have joined an investigation into the crash of the Boeing- 737, according to Itar-Tass.

Experts from the United States as the side that designed and built the plane, France that designed the plane’s engines and Great Britain as the lease provider have been working as members of a Technical commission, set up to investigate the causes of the plane crash, jointly with representatives of Rosaeronavigation company and other civil aviation experts. The task given to the experts of the Technical commission is to conduct an investigation into the aviation incident and make recommendations for prevention of similar catastrophes in future, said Chief of the Technical commission Alexei Morozov.

Meanwhile, operations to collect fragments of the plane wreckage are almost complete, said chief of the public relations department of the regional branch of the Ministry for Emergency Situations Valery Tiunov. Almost all the fragments of the wrecked plane have been collected and clean- up on the crash site has been made, he said.

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A group of foreign experts, representatives of the US National Transportation Safety Board, experts of the US Federal Aviation Administration, two representatives of the Boeing company, experts of the Snecma company that built the plane engines arrived in Perm last night to join the investigation.

Relatives of the passengers killed in the plane crash continue to arrive in Perm. Oksana Butina - spokeswoman for the regional department for Emergency Situations, said that 291 relatives had arrived by Tuesday, including 19 from abroad. There were 21 foreign citizens on board the crashed plane.

On Tuesday medical experts have given psychological assistance to citizens of Turkey, France, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus and the United States. A total of 227 people had asked for psychological assistance.

The Aeroflot Company has been paying initial compensation worth 100,000 roubles each to relatives of the victims. On Tuesday the administration of the Perm region has begun to pay similar compensations. A total of 8. 8 million roubles had been allocated from the reserve fund for this purpose.

Itar-Tass