The worst tragedies in sporting history

Only one of the 37 players and team officials on the flight survived the accident, with 43 of the 45 people on board being killed.

Among those who died were Czech superstars Jan Marek, Karel Rachunek and Josef Vasicek, who had helped their country win six world championships in the last 15 years.

We take a look at some of the other terrible occasions where sport has been hit by heartbreaking human tragedy.

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Perhaps the most famous air crash in the history of sport, the star-studded Manchester United side known as the 'Busby Babes' were involved in a plane crash on 6 February 1958 as they returned from a European Cup match against Red Star Belgrade. Eight players were among the 23 people killed, with several of the Untied coaching staff and newspaper journalists among the dead.

Before the crash the plane had aborted its take-off twice, and when the players were sent back to the terminal Duncan Edwards sent a telegram to his landlady to tell her that they would be returning the next day instead.

Yet the plane's captain decided to attempt a third take-off despite the snowy, icy conditions, and the plane ended up ploughing off the end of the runway and into a house. Edwards survived the initial crash impact, but died two weeks later from his injuries.

Team manager Matt Busby was also considered by doctors to have no hope of survival due to his injuries and was even given the last rites - but he eventually returned to his job and led United to European Cup victory ten years later.

The Boeing 707 carrying the entire US figure skating team to the World Championships in Poland had made it all the way across the Atlantic from New York, but the plane crashed on its approach to Brussels for a final refuelling stop en route to Prague.

Eye witnesses reported that the plane banked erratically while circling before landing, and crashed into the ground killing all 72 on board - including 18 skaters, six coaches and ten judges - as well as a farmer on the ground who was hit by shrapnel.

America had dominated the sport throughout the preceding decade, and the championships themselves were cancelled due to the disaster.

In recent years the Italian football club have often played second-fiddle to their Turin neighbours Juventus, but in the late 1940s they were an oustanding side who had won the Serie A title three times in a row up to the 1947-48 season.

The events of 4 May 1949 changed all that: the Fiat G212CP plane they had chartered to return from a testimonial match against Benfica crashed into Superga hill on its descent into Turin. All 31 people on board were killed, including 18 players - 10 of whom were Italian internationals.

Torino had been leading Serie A at the time of the crash and continued in the league, fielding a youth team. Their opponents for the four remaining matches of the season, very sportingly, also fielded their youth teams and Torino's fallen heroes ended up winning one more title.

A Uruguayan rugby team were among those on board an air force flight across the Andes from Montevideo to Santiago when the plane crashed due to a navigational error caused by thick cloud and strong headwinds on 12 October 1972. 12 of the 45 on board died immediately after the crash, with a further eight being killed in an avalanche 16 days later. Eventually, after 72 days of extreme survival that saw the team resort to cannibalism, 16 were rescued.

Arguably the most infamous incident in the history of sport saw eight members of Black September, a splinter group of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, attack the Israeli team headquarters in the Olympic Village on September 5, with six days of the Munich Games left.

Black September swiftly murdered a weightlifter and a wrestling coach, and then kept nine Israeli athletes hostage as they demanded the release of 200 political prisoners being kept in Israeli jails.

After a day of negotiations proved unsuccessful, the hostages were taken to a German military airport with the aim of returning to the Middle East.

But German police snipers opened fire, prompting a gun battle which left all nine hostages dead, along with a policeman and two Black September members.

Almost the entire Zambia squad were killed when their Zambian Air Force transport ditched into the ocean 500m off the coast of Gabon. All 30 passengers who had been on board the 18-year-old plane were killed, including 18 players, the coach and all the team's support staff. An investigation suggested that the crash was caused when the pilot - hampered by fatigue and instrument failure - tried to shut down an engine that had caught fire, but accidentally shut down the wrong one.

In the dying days of Saddam Hussein's regime a series of attacks on athletes left nearly 50 athletes and coaches either dead or missing. On May 17, 15 athletes and officials from a taekwondo team were kidnapped as they headed to a training camp in Jordan. None were seen alive again, and remains of 13 of the squad were found a year later in the desert.

On May 26, gunmen shot and killed the Iraqi national tennis coach and two of his players in Baghdad. Police believed that their crime was wearing shorts, something that Islamic extremists had warned people against in the days preceding the attack.

And on July 16, 50 gunmen made a daytime raid on a conference centre in Baghdad and kidnapped 30 Iraqi sports officials, including Ahmed al-Hadjiya, the head of Iraq's Olympic committee.