Ice hockey player survivor of Russia air crash dies in hospital

Sep 12, 2011, 8:34 GMT

Moscow - A Russian ice hockey player who survived a deadly airplane crash died in hospital on Monday, according to news reports.

Aleksandr Galimov, 26, had suffered burns over 80 per cent of his body and other injuries in a Thursday charter plane crash in the central Russian city Yaroslavl.

He had been one of two survivors from the crash, in which most members of the squad of the Russian ice hockey club Lokomotiv Yaroslavl were killed.

'We have been fighting for his life, but we were not able to save Sasha (Aleksandr) despite the use of modern technology,' a surgeon with the Moscow Vishnevsky Institute told Interfax. Galimov had been in an artificial coma.

Galimov, who started playing professional ice hockey with Lokomotiv Yaroslavl in 2004, played in the Russian under-20 team that won a silver medal at the 2005 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships. He also played for the Russian national team.

Galimov's death raised the Yaroslavl air crash's death toll to 44, and left Aleksandr Sizov, the plane's flight engineer, as the accident's only survivor.

Sizov's life was 'no longer in danger' and he was expected to recover from his injuries, according to a statement from Moscow's Sklifosovsky Institute, where he is receiving treatment.

A government investigation into the accident and analysis of flight recorder data was continuing on Monday.

The Yak-42 charter plane carrying players and staff of the ice hockey team was in full working order, and one of its engines had received a full overhaul in August per government aviation law, a Monday statement from Russia's prosecutor general office said, citing a review of the aircraft's maintenance records.

The plane overran its runway on take-off and clipped a radar tower before striking the ground and catching on fire. Investigators have named a technical fault and pilot error as the most likely causes of the crash.