Thirty-nine people were killed when a Russian military transport plane crashed in Syria on Tuesday, Russian news agencies quoted the defense ministry as saying. The defense ministry was cited as saying that the plane, a Soviet-designed An-26, crashed at Russias Hmeimim air base in Latakia Province and that initial information suggested the incident may have been caused by a technical fault. "According to the latest updates, the An-26 transport aircraft, which crashed while landing at Hmeimim airbase, was carrying 33 passengers and six crew. All of them were members of the Russian Armed Forces," Interfax news agency quoted the defense ministry as saying. "The crew and the passengers were killed." Originally, Russian news agencies cited the defense ministry as saying that 32 passengers and crew were killed in the crash, but this was later revised. Russian state TV cited military officials as saying the aircraft had not been brought down by enemy fire. It said the crash happened as the plane came into land at Hmeimim, and that it came down around 500 meters (550 yards) short of the runway. Interfax quoted a spokeswoman for Russias Investigative Committee, which handles high-profile cases, as saying Russian investigators have been dispatched to Syria to look into the crash. President Vladimir Putin, on an election campaign stop in the Ural mountains, was briefed on the crash via telephone by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and expressed his condolences to the relatives and colleagues of those killed, the Kremlin said. According to a Reuters tally based on official announcements before Tuesdays crash, 44 Russian service personnel have died in Syria since it intervened in the war in September 2015. In one incident last month, Syrian rebels shot down a Russian warplane. The pilot ejected and died on the ground in a gunfight with rebels. In addition to those deaths, in December 2016 a plane carrying a Russian military orchestra to Syria crashed in the Black Sea, killing all 92 people on board. Under a decree signed by Putin, the Russian authorities do not have to disclose all deaths of service personnel in Syria because they are classified as a state secret. The Antonov An-26 is a twin-engine transport plane designed in the late 1960s in the Soviet Union. Large numbers have remained in service in Russia and many other countries around the world. An An-26 belonging to a military flight school crash-landed and caught fire southeast of Moscow in May, killing one crewmember. The RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday quoted Col. Gen. Nikolai Antoshkin, former deputy commander of the Russian Air Force, as calling the An-26 a "reliable machine" even though it has been out of production since 1986.