Canoe

Thursday, January 25, 2001

Plane crash kills 24

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- An airplane carrying American and European tourists crashed Thursday into a neighborhood in a southern Venezuelan city, killing all 24 people on board, officials said.

Rutaca Flight 224 crashed in the evening shortly after taking off from Ciudad Bolivar, said Victor Arauja, a pilot for the airline Rutaca. The cause of the crash of the DC-3 aircraft wasn't immediately known.

There were no survivors, Arauja told The Associated Press.

The plane reportedly went down in a neighborhood, Arauja said. Firefighters extinguished a blaze at the crash site, Globovision television said. Two children on the ground sustained burn injuries, said Angel Rangel, director of Venezuela's national civil defense agency.

Among the passengers were six Americans, five Dutch nationals and five Italians, according to a passenger list provided to Globovision Television by officials at the Ciudad Bolivar airport. The nationalities of the other four were not announced. All four Venezuelan crew members died, Arauja said.

The identities and hometowns of the dead were not immediately known. Officials had recovered bodies from the wreckage and taken them to a morgue in Ciudad Bolivar, where authorities were trying to contact foreign embassies, TV Guayana reported.

The flight -- headed from Canaima in southern Bolivar state to Por La Mar in the country's northeast -- had landed in Ciudad Bolivar for refueling before the crash, said Hernan Guevara, a director at the city's airport quoted by Globovision television.

Rutaca is a cargo and passenger carrier based in Ciudad Bolivar, about 335 miles southeast of Caracas, Venezuela's capital, Globovision reported.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), January 25, 2001

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Canoe

Friday, January 26, 2001

Three Canadians dead in Venezuelan plane crash

CIUDAD BOLIVAR, Venezuela (CP) -- Three Canadians were among 24 people killed when a plane filled with foreign tourists crashed into a shantytown here Thursday while on a flight to the Caribbean island of Margarita, officials said Friday.

A Foreign Affairs Department official in Ottawa said investigators had confirmed that the Canadians were aboard and said their families had been notified. No other information on them was released.

Officials and witnesses said the propellor-driven DC-3 burst into flames upon impact, setting fire to homes and showering the Abobo shantytown in Ciudad Bolivar with debris. A woman and her two children were hospitalized with burns.

Besides the Canadians, the dead passengers included three U.S. citizens, five Dutch nationals, four Italians, two Hungarians, two Venezuelans and one Austrian. All four Venezuelan crew members also perished.

Initial reports said six U.S. citizens were aboard, but that was apparently based on erroneous information provided to Venezuelan authorities by Rutaca Airlines, the U.S. Embassy in Caracas said in a statement Friday.

U.S. and Canadian officials flew to Ciudad Bolivar on Friday.

At a local cemetery, grieving Venezuelan families stared at 24 grey metal coffins that lay on the ground. Forensic scientists sent from Caracas, the capital, arrived in the afternoon to take the coffins to the airport to identify victims. Bolivar state Gov. Antonio Rojas Suarez tried to console the relatives.

"The pain is ours, not theirs," Anabelle Manrique, wife of the plane's co-pilot, Walter Manrique, 44, said through tears, nodding toward police standing between the crowd and the coffins. She had been waiting since dawn to claim her husband's remains.

Foreign embassies sent diplomats to Ciudad Bolivar to assist in identifying bodies. At mid-afternoon, the crash site was strewn with charred clothing, currency and luggage. The plane's tail section and mangled engine parts and propeller blades were visible behind yellow police tape.

Rutaca Airlines Flight 224 had left from Canaima, in southern Bolivar state, and had stopped in Ciudad Bolivar for refuelling before heading on to Porlamar on the popular Caribbean tourist island of Margarita.

Ciudad Bolivar is about 500 kilometres southeast of Caracas, Venezuela's capital, while Canaima is used by tourists to visit Venezuela's famed Angel Falls, the world's highest.

Moments after takeoff in Ciudad Bolivar, the pilot radioed air traffic controllers that he was turning back, but he didn't say why and didn't declare an emergency, said Benjamin Uquillas, a spokesman for Venezuela's Air Rescue Service agency.

Witnesses said they saw the plane come down with one of its two engines on fire, smash into a large tree and burst into flames. A wing spun off, slamming into the homes, said Jose Laurencia Silva, a reporter for the newspaper El Expreso Bolivar.

Shantytown residents Neida del Carmen Alcacer, 22, and her children Valentina, 2, and Manuel, six months, were reported in stable condition with second- and third-degree burns. Only the charred walls of their one-room tin shack were standing Friday.

Lilia Principal, 29, said she was eating dinner with her husband when she spotted the plane, screamed "It's going to fall on us!" and ran from her house with her family. All were knocked to the ground by the explosion, she said.

A neighbour screamed that her baby was inside a burning shack, Principal said, adding that a man pulled the baby out through a window and rushed the child to the hospital.

Some witnesses said the plane came down with one of its two engines on fire. Anabelle Manrique and Alejandro Lopez, a brother-in-law of Capt. Angel Lopez, 63, insisted that both pilots had complained recently that they had made at least four emergency landings because of engine trouble with the aircraft.

Rutaca is a cargo and passenger carrier based in Ciudad Bolivar. It flies to Trinidad, Guyana and Venezuelan tourist destinations.

The DC-3 is twin-propeller aircraft built in the United States between 1935 and 1946. Hundreds remain in service throughout the world as cargo and charter planes.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), January 27, 2001.