Twenty-four people died when a Swiss plane crashed near Zurich, police said yesterday, in a new blow to an airline industry reeling in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in the US.
Nine survived out of the 33 people aboard the 97-seat Crossair plane from Berlin, which crashed late on Saturday while trying to land at Zurich airport.
PHOTO: AP
Ten people were initially said to have died, with 14 missing, but police called off a search for survivors and police commander Peter Grueter said the 14 were presumed dead.
"They were probably in the middle of the plane and they are either incinerated or buried in the ground," he said.
"The search and rescue phase has been ended," he told a news conference earlier. "Unfortunately, no more survivors have been found."
Among the victims was US pop singer Melanie Thornton, who was on tour to publicize her solo album Ready to Fly, police said.
The crash was a blow to Crossair, which had been trying to win back customer confidence after air traffic plunged in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington.
A total of 265 people also died barely two weeks ago when an American Airlines plane crashed in New York. Investigators have blamed air turbulence but the exact cause is not yet known.
Crossair has been designated to operate most of the destinations of failed flag carrier Swissair, which collapsed last month under a mountain of debt.
Swiss President Moritz Leuenberger said he was saddened by a series of disasters hitting Switzerland in a short span of time, including a massacre in the local parliament in Zug in September and the Gotthard tunnel inferno in October.
"Will it never end?" he exclaimed at a news conference.
Survivor Miriam Wettstein told Tele24 television that she had run away from the burning plane.
"It was like a nightmare. This only happens in films," she said. "I had no time to be scared, I was just very cold. I thought `I have to get out of here, the plane can explode.'"
The nationalities of the passengers were Swiss, German, Austrian, Israeli, Canadian and Dutch, but Grueter did not give a breakdown of which were among the dead. Two of the survivors were in critical condition, three were stable and four "doing well under the circumstances," he said.
The four-engine jet was on an instrument landing approach when it crashed just minutes from the Zurich airport.
Aviation experts said they are leaning toward theories of either pilot error or technical failure as the plane ended up too low, too soon on its way to landing strip number 28.
The strip has only been in use since late last month.
Police at the snow-covered crash site near the town of Birchwil, just a few kilometers from the runway, had at first hoped more survivors might be found wandering in nearby woods, but a more meticulous search after daybreak proved fruitless.
Rescuers said the nine survivors, with varying degrees of burns, had walked unaided from the plane to be taken to hospital.
There was no word on the cause of the crash but police said there was no indication the plane had been attacked. "That is something that would seem at the moment to be quite unlikely," police spokesman Hans Baltensberger said.
The plane's two black boxes were found just over an hour after the crash, which occurred in poor weather, officials said.
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