Relatives began the grim task on Thursday of identifying bodies of some of the 113 passengers and crew killed when their Armenian airliner crashed into the Black Sea off Russia's coast.
In Sochi, the Russian holiday resort near where the Airbus A-320 crashed, a crowd of about 60 people gathered outside the morgue to examine photographs of corpses hanging on a wall.
Most showed battered faces but some corpses were too disfigured. One photograph showed only a man's hand with a ring on one finger. Anyone who recognised a relative was ushered inside the morgue to view the body.
"People are, of course, in shock. It is an enormous stress for them," said Yuri Meditsa, a psychologist who was assigned to counsel grieving relatives at the morgue.
"There are bodies that can be identified and there are some that, realistically, cannot," he said. There were at least five children on the plane which took off from the Armenian capital Yerevan early on Wednesday bound for Sochi's airport. Most of the passengers were Armenian. There were 26 Russian passport holders on board.
A day and a half after the jet vanished from radar screens, divers and rescue workers in boats had pulled 49 bodies from the water, officials said. Twenty of the dead had been identified.
The first bodies will be flown home to Armenia later on Thursday for burial, Armenian government minister Hovik Abrahamiyan said in Yerevan.
The search was going on for more bodies and for the aircraft's "black box" flight recorder which should help investigators piece together the jet's last moments.
Crash investigators had picked up a radio tracking signal from one of the black boxes lying on the seabed, said Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman for Russia's Emergencies Ministry.
Investigators and officials from Armavia, the airline operating the plane, said they believed torrential rain and poor visibility were factors in the crash. Russian prosecutors have ruled out terrorism.
Armavia's managers said the aircraft had initially turned back to Yerevan because weather conditions in Sochi made it impossible to land.
The crew changed course again and tried to land at Sochi a second time when flight controllers told them the weather had cleared slightly, the airline said.
FINAL MINUTES: There was a haunting glimpse into the flight's final minutes on Thursday when the Rossiya television station broadcast what it said was a taped radio exchange between the crew and air traffic controllers in neighbouring Georgia.
"We are returning to Yerevan," a crew member can be heard saying over a crackly radio link.
"Right now or later?" the controller asks. "Now," the crew member replied.
A special submersible was despatched to Sochi to help retrieve some of the debris which, rescuers say, has sunk to the seabed about 500 metres (1,600 feet) down.
Russian television showed a rescuer picking up a single, white training shoe from the water and adding it to a pile of clothes and shredded suitcases on the deck of his dinghy.
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