Plane 'a ball of fire'

2005-08-16 21:11

Caracas - The Colombian plane that crashed in Venezuelan mountains on Tuesday plummeted like a huge ball of fire before slamming into the ground and exploding, killing the 160 people aboard, said a witness.

Rescuers removed bodies from the wreckage of the West Caribbean Airways plane in northwestern Venezuela in the hours after the disaster.

"You can see burned bodies," said a civil protection official at the crash. "It is very depressing because there are no survivors."

A witness described watching the plane drop to the ground.

"What I saw was an enormous ball of fire that was falling and falling until you could hear a loud explosion," the witness told local radio.

Venezuelan national civil defence director Antonio Rivero described the crash site as a "horrific scene" with smoke billowing from the wreckage.

"It is a disaster zone," he said.

Crashed just before dawn

Venezuelan and Colombian firefighters and soldiers were at the scene, where at least 56 bodies had been recovered, Rivero said.

The bodies will be flown by helicopter to the northwestern city of Maracaibo, where they will be identified, said the head of Venezuela's search and rescue service, Major Javier Perez Pacheco.

The McDonnell-Douglas MD-82 jet crashed just before dawn on Tuesday after the pilot reported engine trouble.

The plane was flying from Panama to the French Caribbean island of Martinique.

The victims were returning to Martinique after holidaying in Panama, said a representative of the travel agency that booked the flight to Fort de France, Martinique.

French authorities said the plane was carrying 153 French citizens from Martinique, while Colombian officials and the airline said there were 152 passengers and eight Colombian crew.

It was the second accident in five months involving the Colombian airline.

In March, another of its planes, a Let-410, crashed minutes after taking off from Colombia's Providencia Island, killing the two crew and six of the 12 passengers.

That crash is still under investigation.

- AFP