14 dead as plane crashes

2005-08-06 19:09

Rome - Fourteen people were killed when a Tunisian passenger plane crash-landed on the sea off southern Italy on Friday, but 20 of the approximately 40 people aboard survived, Italian officials said.

Five people were missing and several of the survivors were in critical condition, port officials said in the Sicilian city of Palermo where the ATR-42 plane had been trying to make an emergency landing.

The plane, was operated by Tuninter, a subsidiary of the Tunisair company and had been flying from the southern Italian city of Bari to the Tunisian resort of Djerba.

According to the company, all 35 passengers on the plane were Italian and four-member crew was Tunisian.

The Ansa news agency said four rescue boats and naval helicopters had gone to the scene, 33 kilometres off Cape Gallo on the northern coast of Sicily, while on shore dozens of ambulances were on standby to ferry survivors to Palermo hospitals.

Several bodies were found in the sea by rescue boats which rushed to the floating wreckage of the twin-turboprop plane.

The pilot of Flight 1153 from Bari in southern Italy to Djerba had been trying to make an emergency landing at Palermo airport but failed to make it and came down on the sea.

The accident, which happened at 13:55 GMT, was the first involving a plane owned by Tunisair since the company was founded in 1948, an aviation source said in Tunis.

The twin-turboprop ATR-42 was the first of a family of regional airliners built by a consortium of France's Aerospatiale and Italy's Aeritalia, now Alenia.

The first prototype flew in August, 1984 and several hundred have been built.

- AFP