Investigators have found that a failure to deice the aircraft could be the most likely cause for Monday's plane crash that left 31 people dead and 12 others injured in Russia's Siberia, the Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said Wednesday.

"Based on materials obtained, Monday's air crash near Tyumen could be caused by the fact that the plane had not been sprayed with deicing fluid before taking off," said Markin.

The UTair Airlines, operator of the French-Italian-made ATR-72 passenger plane, has also confirmed that the plane had not been deiced on Monday.

Icing has led to two other fatal air disasters before, both involving the plane ATR-72 mode, official statistics show.

According to Martin, the Interstate Aviation Committee team, comprising investigators and experts from France, Canada and Britain, had completed the examination of the plane crash site with an unmanned aerial vehicle.

An ATR-72 airplane and owned by UTair Airlines, on Monday carried 39 passengers and four crew members aboard for a flight between Tyumen and Surgut, both in Siberia. The plane went down at around 5:50 a.m. Moscow time (0150 GMT) shortly after it took off from the airport in Tyumen, a key Siberian city about 2,100 kilometers east of Moscow, killing 31 people and injuring 12 more.

Eleven of the 12 injured were hospitalized in Tyumen, while the last one had been taken to another hospital in Moscow for further treatment.

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