MEDELLIN,
Colombia (AP) — A chartered plane carrying a Brazilian first division soccer
team crashed outside Medellin while on its way to the finals of a regional
tournament, killing 76 people, Colombian officials said Tuesday. Six people
initially survived, but one of them later died in a hospital.
The British
Aerospace 146 short-haul plane, operated by a charter airline named LaMia,
declared an emergency and lost radar contact just before 10 p.m. Monday (0300
GMT) because of an electrical failure, aviation authorities said.
The aircraft,
which had departed from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, was transporting the Chapecoense
soccer team from southern Brazil for the first leg Wednesday of a two-game Copa
Sudamericana final against Atletico Nacional of Medellin.
“What was
supposed to be a celebration has turned into a tragedy,” Medellin Mayor
Federico Gutierrez said from the search and rescue command center.
The club said
in a brief statement on its Facebook page that “may God accompany our athletes,
officials, journalists and other guests traveling with our delegation.”
South
America’s soccer federation extended its condolences to the entire Chapecoense
community and said its president, Alejandro Dominguez, was on his way to
Medellin. All soccer activities were suspended until further notice, the
organization said in a statement.
Dozens of
rescuers working through the night were initially heartened after pulling three
passengers alive from the wreckage. But as the hours passed, and heavy rainfall
and low visibility grounded helicopters and complicated efforts to reach the
mountainside crash site, the mood soured to the point that authorities had to
freeze until dusk what was by then a body recovery operation.
Images
broadcast on local television showed three passengers arriving to a local
hospital in ambulances on stretchers and covered in blankets connected to an
IV. Among the survivors was a Chapecoense defender named Alan Ruschel, who
doctors said suffered spinal injuries. Two goalkeepers, Danilo and Jackson
Follmann, as well as a member of the team’s delegation and a Bolivian flight
attendant, were found alive in the wreckage.
But Danilo
later died while receiving hospital treatment, team spokesman Andrei Copetti
told The Associated Press.
The plane was
carrying 72 passengers and nine crew members, aviation authorities said in a
statement. Local radio said the same aircraft transported Argentina’s national
squad for a match earlier this month in Brazil, and previously had transported
Venezuela’s national team.
British
Aerospace, which is now known as BAE Systems, says that the first 146-model
plane took off in 1981 and that just under 400 — including the successor Avro
RJ — were built in total in the U.K. through 2003. It says around 220 of are
still in service in a variety of roles, including aerial firefighting and
overnight freight services.
Alfredo
Bocanegra, the head of Colombia’s aviation authority, said initial reports
suggest the aircraft was suffering electrical problems although investigators
were also looking into an account from one of the survivors that the plane had
run out of fuel about 5 minutes from its expected landing at Jose Maria Cordova
airport outside Medellin.
A video
published on the team’s Facebook page showed the team readying for the flight
earlier Monday in Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos international airport. It wasn’t
immediately clear if the team switched planes in Bolivia or just made a
stopover with the same plane.
The team, from
the small city of Chapeco, was in the middle of a fairy tale season. It joined
Brazil’s first division in 2014 for the first time since the 1970s and made it
last week to the Copa Sudamericana finals — the equivalent of the UEFA Europa
League tournament — after defeating two of Argentina’s fiercest squads, San
Lorenzo and Independiente, as well as Colombia’s Junior.
“This morning
I said goodbye to them and they told me they were going after the dream,
turning that dream into reality,” Chapecoense board member told TV Globo. “The
dream was over early this morning.”
The team is so
modest that its 22,000-seat arena was ruled by tournament organizers too small
to host the final match, which was instead moved to a stadium 300 miles (480
kilometers) to the north in the city of Curitiba.
“This is
unbelievable, I am walking on the grass of the stadium and I feel like I am
floating,” Copetti told the AP. “No one understands how a story that was so
amazing could suffer such a devastating reversal. For many people here reality
has still not struck.”
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