Tag Archives: no survivors

Identifying remains arduous as Florida condo collapse death toll rises to 94

(Reuters) -Confirmed deaths in the partial collapse of a condominium near Miami rose by four to 94 on Monday as identifying remains became progressively difficult with the recovery effort in its 19th day, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said.

Due to the passage of time, recovery workers are leaning more heavily on the medical examiner’s office to identify recovered bodies, an undertaking that is “very methodical” and takes time, Levine Cava said at a briefing.

The number of people still unaccounted for dropped to 22 on Monday from 31 a day earlier, and may include some of the victims who have yet to be identified in the rubble of the 12-story oceanfront building in the town of Surfside that partially collapsed in the early morning hours of June 24.

“The process of making identifications has become more difficult as time goes on, and the recovery at this point is yielding human remains,” Levine Cava said.

With no survivors rescued from the ruins since the first few hours after the collapse, officials last week declared that their search effort had switched from rescue to recovery.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said security is being tightened at the site due to the importance of the location to families who lost loved ones.

A debate has already begun in the community over what to do with the site, with some people eager for it to be turned into a memorial for the victims.

“It’s much more than a collapsed building. It is a holy site,” Burkett said.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut and Barbara Goldberg in Maplewood, New Jersey; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Steve Orlofsky)

No survivors from plane crash in Russia’s far east, rescue officials say

MOSCOW (Reuters) -There are no survivors after a plane carrying 28 people crashed in the far east of Russia on Tuesday, Russian news agencies cited rescue officials as saying.

The Antonov An-26 twin-engine turboprop was en route from the regional capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Palana, a village in the north of the Kamchatka peninsula, when it lost contact with air traffic control, the emergencies ministry said.

Citing sources, Interfax reported that the plane was thought to have crashed into a cliff as it was preparing to land in poor visibility conditions.

Russia’s civil aviation authority confirmed that the plane’s crash site had been found after the emergencies ministry dispatched a helicopter and had deployed teams on the ground to look for the missing aircraft.

There were 22 passengers and six crew on board, the ministry said. Olga Mokhireva, the mayor of Palana, was among the passengers, the TASS agency quoted local authorities as saying.

The weather in the area was cloudy at the time the plane went missing, Russian news agencies reported. TASS said the aircraft involved had been in service since 1982.

Russian aviation safety standards have improved in recent years but accidents, especially involving ageing planes in far-flung regions, are not uncommon.

The Soviet-era plane type, still used for military and civilian flights in some countries, has been involved in dozens of deadly crashes since it entered service around 50 years ago.

An Antonov-28, a similar plane, slammed into a Kamchatka forest in 2012 in a crash that killed 10 people along the same route. Investigators said both pilots were drunk at the time of the crash.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova, Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber and Gleb Stolyarov; Editing by Kim Coghill, John Stonestreet and Alison Williams)

‘No survivors’ after plane crash in northern Pakistan mountains

FILE PHOTO - A Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) passenger plane arrives at the Benazir International airport in Islamabad, Pakistan

By Jibran Ahmed and Asad Hashim

PESHAWAR/ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) – There were no survivors after a plane carrying 47 people crashed into a mountain in northern Pakistan on Wednesday, the airline’s chairman said, as recovery operations continued late into the night at the remote crash site.

The military said 40 bodies had been recovered and rescue efforts involved about 500 soldiers, doctors and paramedics. The bodies were shifted to the Ayub Medical Center in nearby Abbottabad, about 20km (12 miles) away.

“There are no survivors, no one has survived,” said Muhammad Azam Saigol, the chairman for Pakistan International Airlines. PIA-operated flight PK661, which crashed en route from Chitral to the capital, Islamabad.

Junaid Jamshed, a well-known Pakistani pop star turned evangelical Muslim cleric, was among those feared dead, an airline official said.

PIA said the captain of the flight had reported losing power in one engine minutes before its plane lost contact with the control tower en route to the capital.

The airline said the plane crashed at 4:42 pm local time (1142 GMT) in the Havelian area of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, about 40km (25 miles) north of Islamabad. Chitral, where the flight originated, is a popular tourist destination in Pakistan.

Saigol said the ATR turboprop aircraft had undergone regular maintenance and in October had passed an “A-check” maintenance certification, performed after every 500 flight hours.

He said a full investigation of the crash, involving international agencies, would be conducted.

“All of the bodies are burned beyond recognition. The debris are scattered,” Taj Muhammad Khan, a government official based in Havelian, told Reuters.

Khan, who was at the crash site, said witnesses told him “the aircraft has crashed in a mountainous area, and before it hit the ground it was on fire”.

Pakistani television showed a trail of wreckage engulfed in flames on a mountain slope.

Irfan Elahi, the government’s aviation secretary, told media the plane suffered engine problems but it was too early to determine the cause of the accident.

THREE FOREIGNERS ON BOARD

In a late night statement, PIA said the plane was carrying 47 people, including five crew members and 42 passengers. Earlier, the airline had said there were 48 people on board.

The airline said two Austrian citizens and one Chinese citizen, all men, had been on board. The flight manifest showed three people on board with foreign names.

The Austrian foreign minister’s spokesman later confirmed two Austrians had been killed in the crash.

A local trader at the site of the crash said the fire was still burning nearly two hours after the crash.

“They are removing body parts,” Nasim Gohar told Geo TV.

The military said it had sent in troops and helicopters.

“PIA is doing everything possible to help the families of passengers and crew members,” the airline said in a statement.

The pop singer Jamshed, a member of one of Pakistan’s first successful rock bands in the 1990s, abandoned his singing career to join the Tableeghi Jamaat group, which travels across Pakistan and abroad preaching about Islam.

In his last tweet, Jamshed posted pictures of a snow-capped mountain, calling Chitral “Heaven on Earth”.

Plane crashes are not uncommon in Pakistan and safety standards are often criticized. In recent years, media have reported on multiple near-misses as planes over-ran runways and engines caught fire.

In 2010, a passenger plane crashed in heavy rain near Islamabad, killing all 152 people on board. Two years later, a plane operated by a private Pakistani company, with 127 people on board, crashed near Islamabad. All on board were killed.

PIA has also suffered major disasters in the past.

In 1979 and 1992, PIA jets crashed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and in Kathmandu, killing 156 and 167 people, respectively.

In 2006, a PIA plane crashed near the central city of Multan, killing 45 people.

(Additional reporting by Mehreen Zahra-Malik and Amjad Ali in ISLAMABAD and Gul Hamad Farooqi in CHITRAL,; Writing by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Larry King)