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Plane with 68 aboard crashes in Cuba
HAVANA | Fri Nov 5, 2010 12:52am EDT
HAVANA (Reuters) - A plane carrying 68 people crashed in a mountainous region of central Cuba after issuing an emergency call, state-run media said on Thursday, and there were no initial reports of survivors. Cuban television said the plane was an ATR-72-212 twin turboprop aircraft flown by Cuba's state-owned Aero Caribbean airlines.
The media reports said there were 40 Cubans on board, including seven crew members, and 28 foreigners. The plane, Flight 883, left Santiago de Cuba in eastern Cuba en route to Havana and went down at 5:42 p.m. local time (6:42 p.m. EDT) near the town of Guasimal in Sancti Spiritus province.
After making an emergency call, the plane lost contact with air traffic controllers. An employee at the Guasimal hospital told Reuters that officials there were told nobody survived the crash. "They called just now and said there are no survivors but I don't know if it's true," the employee said. "So far they haven't brought anybody" to the hospital.
Sources in Sancti Spiritus said seven bodies had been pulled from the wreckage, which a witness described as "a ball of flame in the middle of the mountain." Rescue workers had to use a bulldozer to plow their way through thick vegetation to the crash site, the sources said.
(Reporting by Marc Frank, Esteban Israel, Rosa Tania Valdes and Nelson Acosta; Writing by Jeff Franks; Editing by John O'Callaghan)
