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Sunday August 27 3:58 PM ET

Costa Rica Plane Found Crashed Into Volcano

By Daniel Brenes

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) - Rescue crews on Sunday found the wreckage of a tour plane, missing since Saturday, near the crater of a live volcano in northern Costa Rica and said none of the 10 people on board appeared to have survived the crash.

``The impact of the small plane against the volcano was head on. We don't believe there are any survivors,'' Guillermo Arroyo, head of Costa Rica Red Cross, told Reuters.

The first rescue crew arrived at the site by helicopter.

``There are seven corpses lying outside the plane and we think the rest are inside,'' another Red Cross official told journalists.

The 14-seater Cessna took off at 12:45 p.m. local time Saturday from Arenal, some 88 miles from the Costa Rican capital, San Jose.

It was bound for Tamarindo on the Pacific Coast but the plane never arrived and there was no radio warning from the pilot about any problems during what had been expected to be a 25-minute flight.

The plane was carrying eight tourists and two crew. No official list of passengers aboard the plane was available.

The tour group SANSA that owned the plane named a Canadian woman, Terry Pratt, as one of the victims and said there were two Dutch women tourists on board.

A company spokesman said the pilot and co-pilot were Costa Rican but did not give the nationalities of the remaining five tourists. The Red Cross earlier mentioned two female Swiss passengers.

Police initially said there were nine tourists on board but officials on Sunday said the plane made a first stop at El Tanque in La Fortuna to drop off Japanese tourist Masaru Hamatani.

Claudio Lara, pilot of the helicopter that found the plane, said rescuing the bodies from the Arenal volcano would be very difficult.

``The plane is scattered at around 1,300 feet below the crater, a zone of a lot of volcanic activity,'' Lara told Reuters by telephone.

Local television images showed the plane fuselage near the smoking rim of the arid crater and no sign of any survivors.

``We are mobilizing some 150 rescuers with masks and special equipment to protect them from toxic gases, as well as many ambulances,'' said the Red Cross' Arroyo.

Arenal, 94 miles north of the capital San Jose, erupted on Wednesday, killing a Costa Rican tour guide. A U.S. woman and child with the guide were badly injured from burns and inhaling hot gases.

The volcano, lying in a region of wooded mountains, has been active since 1968. Watching the eruptions has become a popular tourist attraction in Costa Rica.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), August 27, 2000