A West Caribbean Airways airliner traveling from Panama with 152 passengers and eight crew members crashed yesterday in a mountainous region near Venezuela's border with Colombia after suffering engine failure, Venezuelan authorities said.
"We believe it is going to be difficult for there to be survivors," Interior Minister Jesse Chacon said.
Venezuelan troops were searching for survivors from the Colombian airline's MD-80 aircraft that was en route to the French Caribbean island territory of Martinique when it went down, officials said.
Chacon said the aircraft had changed route to request a landing at Chinita Airport in the western Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, but crashed in the Sierra de Perija mountains near the small town of Machiques.
Rescue officials said their efforts were hampered by heavy cloud and rainfall in the area.
"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.
Colonel Carlos Montealegre, the head of Colombia's civil aviation agency, said there were no survivors.
"The firefighters who responded to the crash have confirmed that there were no survivors," he said.
Venezuela's civil protection director, German Bracho, said that most of the passengers were French nationals.
Colombian aviation officials said the crew were all Colombian.
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