Eight people were feared dead after a helicopter carrying 16 people, most of them tourists, crashed in a lake on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's Far East. Staff at a nature reserve described arriving at the site in two speedboats minutes after the crash to find eight survivors who had swum up from a depth of eight or nine metres.
They said two of the survivors were badly hurt and the water temperature was no more than 5-6 degrees Celsius so they would not have survived long. The passengers were able to escape the sinking helicopter through luggage doors that opened at the rear, the regional governor said on state television. The eight other people on board were missing. "The bodies of the dead are most likely at the bottom of Kurilskoe lake," Interfax news agency quoted a health source as saying. - Reuters
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