Cuba yesterday began two days of national mourning for victims of a crash of a state airways aircraft that killed all but three of its 110 passengers and crew.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said an investigation is under way into Friday’s crash of the nearly 40-year-old Boeing 737, leased to national carrier Cubana de Aviacion by a Mexican company.
Three women pulled alive from the mangled wreckage are the only known survivors.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from Jose Marti International Airport, going down in a field near the airport and sending a thick column of acrid smoke into the air.
The mourning period is to last until midnight today, Cuban Communist Party leader and former Cuban president Raul Castro said.
Flags are to be flown at half-mast throughout the country.
The airplane was on an internal flight from Havana to the eastern city of Holguin. Most of the passengers were Cuban, with five foreigners, including two Argentines, among them.
The aircraft — carrying 104 passengers — was almost completely destroyed in the crash and subsequent fire. Firefighters raced to the scene to put out the blaze along with a fleet of ambulances to assist any survivors.
What appeared to be one of the wings was wedged among scorched tree trunks, but the main fuselage was almost entirely destroyed.
Built in 1979, the airplane was leased from a small Mexican company, Global Air, also known as Damojh Aerolineas.
Mexico said it was sending two civil aviation specialists to help in the investigation.
The six crew members were Mexican nationals.
Diaz-Canel, 58, who succeeded Castro as the communist island’s leader only last month, appeared aghast as he surveyed the recovery efforts, wearing a short-sleeved green shirt and surrounded by officials.
Castro sent condolences to families of the victims of the “catastrophic accident,” a statement read, as Russian President Vladimir Putin and a string of Latin American leaders also expressed sympathy.
The airplane took off from Havana at 12:08pm on Friday heading for Holguin, 670km to the east.
From the supermarket where he works near the airport, 49-year-old Jose Luis said he could see the aircraft taking off before it banked and plunged to the ground.
Yasniel Diaz, a 21-year-old musician, said the pilot appeared to attempt an emergency landing, but crashed instead.
“The explosion shook everything,” he said. “I started running, I was so afraid.”
Images from Cuban TV showed rescue workers at the scene removing what appeared to be a survivor on a stretcher as rain began to fall.
Global Air said the airplane was flown by a crew of six Mexicans: the pilot, copilot, three flight attendants and a maintenance technician.
The Mexican Secretariat of Communications and Transportation said the airplane was built in 1979.
Global Air had the necessary permits to lease it and had passed inspections in November last year, it said.
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