MOSCOW - At least 40 people were killed when a Tupolev-134 plane broke up and caught fire on landing in northern Russia, an Emergency Ministry spokesman said on Tuesday.

The plane, carrying 43 passengers and five crew, crashed about 1 km (0.6 miles) from the runway at the airport outside the northern Russian city of Petrozavodsk at about 11.40 pm local time (1940 GMT) on Monday.

"Preliminary information is that about forty are dead. The other eight are in hospital," the spokesman said by telephone. He gave no further details.

The plane was travelling from Moscow.