Another jet crash: 160 killed in Venezuela

A Colombian charter jet carrying tourists from Panama to Martinique crashed in Venezuela yesterday after its engines failed, killing all 160 aboard in one of the country's worst air disasters.

The West Caribbean airways MD-82 aircraft was en route to the French Caribbean island when it reported engine trouble and diverted to an airport in Venezuela. It crashed at a cattle ranch near Venezuela's border with Colombia, authorities said.

"Unfortunately, there were no survivors from this accident," Col. Francisco Paz, head of Venezuela's National Civil Aviation Institute, told local television.

Most of the passengers were local government officials in Martinique who had been on holiday with their families, an official at the Fort-de-France airport in Martinique said. He said the 152 passengers included one baby and four children.

French television broadcast images of victims' relatives crying and shouting as an official read out the names of the plane's passengers at the airport in Martinique.

"There are children who have lost both their mother and their father," said Andre Charpentier, the mayor of Basse-Pointe, a small community of 4,000 inhabitants in the north of Martinique.

The Fort-de-France airport official said the plane had been chartered by the Globe Trotters travel agency in Martinique.Venezuelan Interior Minister Jesse Chacon said the aircraft had changed its route to try to land in the western Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, but lost altitude and crashed in the remote Sierra de Perija region near the border with Colombia.

"When it was flying over Venezuelan airspace, they had problems with one engine and then with another engine, and at that moment it went down," Chacon said.

Authorities have found one of two black box flight data recorders from the aircraft. Data and cockpit voice recorders can provide vital information about the aircraft's last moments.

Venezuelan rescuers in surgical masks waded knee-deep in mud and water searching for bodies in fields where the plane went down.

The aircraft shattered into small parts after ploughing into the ground; its tail was left standing alone, according to a Reuters photographer at the site.

"It's really terrible, I can't describe it, there are bodies mutilated, in pieces, there is practically nothing left out there," local mayor Alfonso Marquez told television reporters by telephone.

Farm workers told local television they had seen the aircraft in flames before it hit the ground

.By midday, rescue workers had pulled 56 bodies from the charred remains of the aircraft, said Col. Antonio Rivero, head of the Civil Protection agency.

It was the second crash involving a West Caribbean airways plane this year.

In Seattle, Boeing said the company was dispatching a team of air safety investigators to help find the cause of the crash. Boeing took over McDonnell Douglas, maker of the MD-82, in 1997.

French Transport Minister Dominique Perben said the airplane was inspected recently and no problems were noted.

"This aircraft, which since May has landed several times on French territory, was twice checked by the local services of the French civil aviation authority DGAC.

West Caribbean is based in the Colombian city of Medellin and operates two McDonnell Douglas MD-81s, an MD-82, two Airbus ATR42s and several smaller aircraft.

In March, a West Caribbean Airways Let L-410 aircraft departing from Providencia, Colombia, failed to ascend and hit hills close to the runway. Two crew and six passengers died in that accident.

The MD-82 aircraft, delivered to its first operator in 1986, passed a safety check by Colombian authorities on Monday. But the airline has been penalised before for excessive weight and other violations, a Colombian aviation official said.

French President Jacques Chirac learned "with very deep emotion of the terrible air disaster which occurred in Venezuela and in which a very great number of victims were French," his office said in a statement.

Martinique is an overseas department of France. Chirac's office said the president had ordered Overseas Territories Minister Francois Baroin to travel to Martinique.

Reuters

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