A Cuban airliner on a flight to Havana crashed in central Cuba, killing all 68 people on board, including 28 foreigners, officials said yesterday via state media.
The plane operated by state-run Aerocaribbean “fell to the ground in the region of Guasimal,” after the pilot reported an emergency, according to a statement by Cuba’s Civil Aeronautics Institute read on state television.
“There were no survivors” from the flight which departed on Thursday afternoon from the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba bound for the capital, the official Web site Cubadebate.cu reported.
PHOTO: AFP
It was Cuba’s worst air disaster in 21 years.
Among the passengers were 10 Europeans, nine Argentinians, seven Mexicans, one Venezuelan and one Japanese, state media reported. The Europeans included three Dutch, two Germans, two Austrians, and one each from France, Italy and Spain.
There were 40 Cubans on board, including seven crew.
Emergency rescue teams from Sancti Spiritus Province where the plane went down, aided by local residents, scrambled to get to the crash site and reached it overnight, finding everyone on board had been killed, officials said.
The Aerocaribbean plane had left Santiago de Cuba, in the island’s far east, ahead of the approach of Tropical Storm Tomas, which was expected to intensify to hurricane status and graze both Cuba and Haiti yesterday.
The twin turbo-propeller ATR-72-212, built by the French--Italian aircraft manufacturer Avions de Transport Regional, lost contact with aviation authorities at around 5:42pm and crashed some 300km southeast of Havana, officials said.
The Civil Aeronautics Institute did not say if foul weather was a factor in the crash. A tropical storm warning was in effect on Thursday in Santiago de Cuba Province where the plane took off, while neighboring Guantanamo Province was under a hurricane warning.
“At the moment, aviation and regional authorities are gathering the facts and details and have created a commission to investigate such a regrettable accident,” the statement said.
The storm had already begun to drench eastern Cuba with rain earlier Thursday, and on the same day Cubana Airlines, another state carrier, canceled all flights in and out of Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo.
Many of the foreigners on board the doomed flight were believed to be tourists. Tourism is the main foreign exchange earner in Cuba after medical care services, bringing in some US$2 billion annually.
About 2.4 million people visited the Caribbean nation last year, mainly from Canada, Britain, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Mexico, Argentina and Russia.
The last crash of a passenger plane in Cuba occurred in March 2002 when a small Antonov-2 went down in the central province of Villa Clara, killing all 16 people — 12 foreign tourists and four Cuban crew — on board.
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