Search and rescue teams combed the jungles of southern Cambodia last night, looking for a passenger plane with 27 people on board that crashed earlier that day while flying between two popular tourist destinations, officials said.
The plane, a Russian-made AN-24, crashed in a mountainous jungle area, and rescue parties were still searching for it as dusk approached, seven hours after it disappeared, they said.
The plane had been flying from Siem Reap -- where the Angkor Wat temple complex is located -- to the coastal city of Sihanoukville, said Him Sarun, Cabinet chief for the Secretariat of Civil Aviation.
An official at Siem Reap airport said 13 of the passengers were from South Korea, three were Czech, and five were Cambodian. Their names were not available.
The official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said the plane carried a crew of five Cambodians and a Russian copilot.
The plane belonged to a small Cambodian airline called PMT Air, which began flying from Siem Reap to Sihanoukville in January.
The airport official said that contact with the plane was lost at 10:50am, five minutes before it was due to land.
Him Sarun said the crash site is thought to be in the mountains of Kampot Province, 130km southwest of Phnom Penh.
But he said that it had not yet been located by rescue teams.
"I have received information from environmental workers based in Bokor mountain who said they had spotted a plane crash" from a distance, said In Chiva, the Kampot Province police chief, noting that the area is in a thick forest.
He said he has sent police to remote districts of the province to look for the crash site.
In addition to its domestic routes, the airline flies two routes from South Korea to Cambodia -- Seoul to Siem Reap and Busan to Siem Reap -- according to South Korea's Ministry of Construction and Transportation.
South Korean officials confirmed that 13 of its citizens were on board the aircraft.
In Seoul, Kim Young-chae, an official at the consular division of the Foreign Ministry, said the government considered the people to be "missing."
He said South Korea would dispatch officials on the next flight out of Seoul to Cambodia to help deal with the matter, and that the government had asked for Phnom Penh's cooperation through its embassy in Seoul.
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