MOSCOW — A passenger airliner careened off the runway at Russia's third-busiest airport and partly onto a highway while landing on Saturday, broke into pieces and caught fire, killing at least four people.

Officials said there were eight people aboard the Tu-204 belonging to Russian airline Red Wings that was flying back from the Czech Republic without passengers to its home at Vnukovo Airport.

Emergency officials said in a televised news conference that four people were killed and another four severely injured when the plane rolled off the runway into a snowy field and partly onto an adjacent highway, then disintegrated. No collisions with vehicles on the major, multilane highway were reported.

The plane's cockpit area was sheared off from the fuselage and a large chunk gashed out near the tail.

The crash occurred amid light snow and winds gusting up to 30 mph, but other details were not immediately known.

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is confronting “new complications” due to a respiratory infection nearly three weeks after undergoing cancer surgery, his vice president said in Cuba as he visited the ailing leader for the first time since his operation.Vice President Nicolas Maduro looked weary and spoke with a solemn expression in a televised address from Havana on Sunday. He described Chavez’s condition as delicate.“Several minutes ago we were with President Chavez. We greeted each other and he himself referred to these complications,” Maduro said, reading from a prepared statement.The vice president’s comments suggest an increasingly difficult fight for Chavez. The Venezuelan leader has not been seen or heard from since undergoing his fourth cancer-related surgery Dec. 11.