Several foreign citizens were among the passengers on board the Airbus 310 airliner that crashed in Irkutsk during landing early Sunday, the Irkutsk airport authorities said.

"Specialists are now looking through lists of all passengers who were aboard the Airbus of the Sibir Air Company. Foreign citizens were aboard the plane, and now we are re-checking their citizenship," a source at a crisis center was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying.

The source added that "several people (Wang Tiecheng, Wang Xiaojie, Li Qingli and Wang Lida) were likely to have the Chinese citizenship."