Venezuelan investigators picked through the shattered wreckage of a plane that crashed with 160 people on board, trying to determine what caused the engines to fail and sent the jet plunging from the sky in the country's deadliest air disaster in history.
The pilot radioed authorities saying both engines had failed and requested permission for an emergency landing Tuesday shortly before the West Caribbean Airways plane plummeted to the ground, killing all aboard, officials said.
Seats, pillows, and smoldering wreckage were strewn across a pasture dotted with trees among cattle ranches near the border with Colombia. The plane's tail jutted from the ground.
Somber-faced rescue workers collected body parts and pieces of bone amid bloodstained clothes that lay near charred trees.
The crash was the deadliest in Venezuelan history, according to the Aviation Safety Network, a nonprofit group that keeps a database of air disasters. It said the death toll surpassed a 1969 crash in Venezuela that killed 155, including 71 victims on the ground.
"I was struck by all of the victims and the massive destruction," rescue worker Jose Pena said.
Search teams recovered one of the jet's black boxes, which could give clues to the crash's cause, said Air Force Major Javier Perez, the search and rescue chief. He said the cockpit voice recorder had not been found.
As the plane developed problems hours before dawn Tuesday, the Colombian pilot radioed a nearby airport in Maracaibo requesting permission to descend from 10,100m to 4,200m, Venezuelan Interior Minister Jesse Chacon said.
Investigators believe the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 fell into a steep descent minutes later, plunging about 2,130m a minute before slamming into the ground, Chacon said.
Residents reported hearing an explosion when the plane went down east of the Sierra de Perija mountains near Machiques, about 650km west of Caracas.
The jet was carrying 152 tourists from Martinique, including a 21-month-old infant, returning home after a week in Panama, officials said. All eight Colombian crew members were killed.
At Martinique's airport, relatives broke down in sobs as a lawmaker read out victims' names. In the town of Ducos, where about 30 victims reportedly lived, some 150 distraught friends and relatives gathered outside city hall.
"I don't understand. It's as though the sky fell on my head today," said Claire Renette, 40, whose sister was among the dead.
Some passengers were descendants of island workers who helped build the Panama Canal a century ago, said Alina Guerrero, a spokeswoman for Panama's Foreign Ministry.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS