HAVANA, (Reuters) – A plane carrying 68 people crashed in a mountainous region of central Cuba after issuing an emergency call, state-run media said yesterday, 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 (2242 GMT) 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.