A small army plane slammed into an apartment building in an upscale neighborhood of Ecuador’s mountainous capital on Thursday, killing at least five people aboard the aircraft and two more on the ground.
The plane grazed a house before plowing into the four-story building, sending a fireball and black smoke into the evening sky and filling a residential yard with the aircraft’s wreckage. A thick mist shrouded the neighborhood at the time, though the cause of the crash was unknown.
“It was horrible. I heard the plane flying very low, then I heard the explosion,” neighbor Camille Avfert said. “We ran out onto the street and saw fire.”
Quito fire chief Atahualpa Sanchez said emergency crews recovered the victims’ badly burned bodies, while rescuers evacuated an unspecified number of injured people in stable condition.
Journalists at the scene saw rescuers carry away a girl whose head was bloodied.
The army said the pilot, a major, the co-pilot, a lieutenant and the mechanic died in the crash. In a later statement it said the pilot’s wife and son were also killed.
The Red Cross reported that two more people on the ground died, including a woman identified as Elena Reascos, the mother of a nine-year-old boy.
“I was with my mother in the house when I heard something crash and there was an explosion,” the boy, Said Arguello, said. “The flames were everywhere. I couldn’t get out of my room and the firefighters rescued me.”
Red Cross official Henry Ochoa told broadcaster Ecuavisa that seven bodies had been found, but “there may be another person or more underneath the fuselage.”
Defense Minister Javier Ponce said the Beechcraft army plane was on a training run. It crashed at about 5:30pm as it approached Quito’s airport from Manta, 260km to the southeast.
The aircraft went down about 4km from the airport on a street where four other planes crashed during the 1990s.
Gonzalez Suarez Avenue, with luxurious buildings up to 15 stories tall, is along the path of descending airplanes as they prepare to land in Quito.
The north-side neighborhood is also home to the US ambassador’s residence, though the crash occurred some distance away and an embassy spokeswoman said that the ambassador had not been hurt.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa visited the site to learn details of the crash.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
RSS